Echoes From 

THE ORIENT. 



A 

BROAD OUTLINE 

OF 

Theosophical Doctrines. 



BY cJlW* " 

William Q. Judge. 

Reprinted from Kate Field's Washington. 



THIRD EDITION. 



NEW YORK: 
The Path, 144 Madison Avenue. 

Theosophical Publishing Society, 7 Duke St., Adelphi, W.C. 

1893. 



The Aryan Press. 



Entered according: to Act of Congress, in the year 1890, 
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D.C, 
by William Q. Judge. 




dedicated to 
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 
with love 
and gratitude 

BY 

THE AUTHOR. 



Antecedent Words. 



he title for these articles was chosen by Miss Kate 



Field when they were first sent for publication 
in her new paper, Kate Field's Washington, in Jan- 
uary, 1890, and to her belongs all the credit for an 
appropriate name. The use of the nom de plume ' ' Oc- 
cultus" was also the suggestion of Miss Field, since 
it was intended that the personality of the author 
should be hidden untile the series was completed. 

The restrictions upon the treatment of the subject 
growing out of the popular character of the paper in 
which they were published precluded the detail and 
elaboration that would have been possible in a phil- 
osophical or religious periodical. No pretense is 
made that the subject of Theosophy as understood in 
the Orient has been exhaustively treated, for, be- 
lieving that millions of years have been devoted by 
the sages who are the guardians of Theosophical 
truth to its investigation, I think no one writer could 
do more than to repeat some of the echoes reaching 
his ears. 




William O. Judge. 



New York, September, 1890. 



Echoes from the Orient. 



i. 



hat appears to the Western mind to be a. very 



v v strange superstition prevails in India about 
wonderful persons who are said to be of immense 
age, and who keep themselves secluded in places not 
accessible to the ordinary traveler. So long has this 
been current in India that the name applied to these 
beings is well known in the Sanskrit language : " Ma- 
hatma, " a compound of two words, ma/ia, great, and 
dtma, soul. The belief in the existence of such per- 
sons is not confined to the ignorant, but is shared by 
the educated of all castes. The lower classes look 
upon the Mahatmas as a sort of gods, and think most 
of their wonderful powers and great age. The pun- 
dits, or learned class, and educated Hindus in gen- 
eral, have a different view ; they say that Mahatmas 
are men or souls with unlimited knowledge of nat- 
ural laws and of man's history and development. 
They claim also that the Mahatmas — or Rishees, as 
they sometimes call them — have preserved the know- 
ledge of all natural laws for ages, not only by tradi- 
tion among their disciples, but also by actual records 
and in libraries existing somewhere in the many un- 
derground temples and passages in India. Some be- 
lievers assert that there are also stores of books and 
records in secluded parts all over that part of Thibet 
which is not known to Europeans, access to them be- 
ing possible only for the Mahatmas and Adepts. 

The credence given to such a universal theory 
grows out of an old Indian doctrine that man is a 




2 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



spiritual being — a soul, in other words — and that this 
soul takes on different bodies from life to life on earth 
in order at last to arrive at such perfect knowledge, 
through repeated experience, as to enable one to as- 
sume a body fit to be the dwelling-place of a Mahat- 
ma or perfected soul. Then, they say, that partic- 
ular soul becomes a spiritual helper to mankind. The 
perfected men are said to know the truth about »the 
genesis of worlds and systems, as well as the develop- 
ment of man upon this and other planets. 

Were such doctrines held only in India, it would 
be natural to pass the subject by with this brief men- 
tion. But when it is found that a large body of peo- 
ple in America and Europe hold the same beliefs, it 
is interesting to note such an un-Western develop- 
ment of thought. The Theosophical Society was 
founded in Xew York in 1S75, with the avowed ob- 
ject of forming a nucleus for a Universal Brother- 
hood, and its founders state that they believe the 
Indian Mahatmas directed them to establish such a 
society. Since its foundation it has gained members 
in all countries, including people of wealth as well 
as those in moderate circumstances, and the highly 
cultured also. Within its ranks there flourish beliefs 
in the Mahatmas of India and in Reincarnation and 
its twin doctrine, Karma. This last holds that no 
power, human or divine, can save one from the con- 
sequences of acts performed, and that in this life we 
are experiencing the results due to us for all acts and 
thoughts which were ours in the preceding incarna- 
tion. 

This has brought out a large bod)- of literature in 
books and magazines published in the United States, 
England, India, and elsewhere. Newspapers are pub- 
lished in the interest of the new-old cult in the vernac- 
ular of Hindustan and also in old Ceylon. Even Jap- 
an has its periodicals devoted to the same end, and to 
ignore so wide-spread a movement would bespeak 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



ignorance of the factors at work in our development. 
When such an eminent authority as the great French 
savant, Emile Bournouf, says that the Theosophical 
movement must be counted as one of the three great 
religious influences in the world to-dav, there is no 
need of an excuse for presenting its teatures m de- 
tail to readers imbued with the civilization of the 
West. 

H. 

j x my former paper I merely hinted at the two princi- 
pal doctrines promulgated by the Theosophical So- 
ciety ; it is well now to notice the fact that the Society 
itself was organized amid a shout of laughter, which 
at intervals ever since has been repeated. Very 
soon after it launched forth, its president, Col. H. S. 
Olcott, who during our late war was a familiar figure 
in Washington, found a new member in Baron Henry 
Louis de Palm, who died and obligingly left his body 
to the Colonel to be cremated. The funeral was 
held at Masonic Hall, New York, and attracted great 
attention. It was Theosophical in its character. Col. 
Olcott presided, a Spiritualist offered an invocation, 
and a Materialist read a service. All this, of course, 
drew forth satire from the press, but served the pur- 
pose of gaining some attention for the young Society. 
Its history since then has been remarkable, and it is 
safe to say that no other similar body in this century 
has drawn to itself so much consideration, stirred up 
such a thinking among people on mystical subjects, 
and grown so rapidly amid the loudest derision and 
against the fiercest opposition, within the short space 
of fifteen years. 

While the press has been sneering and enemies 
have been plotting, the workers in the Society have 
established centers all over the world, and are to-day 
engaged persistently in sending out Theosophical lit- 
erature into every nook and corner of the United 



4 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



States. A glance at the Theosophical map shows a 
line of Branches of the Society dotting a strip of 
this country which reaches from the city of New 
York to the Pacific Coast; at either end this belt 
spreads out to take in Boston and New Orleans in the 
East and San Francisco and San Diego in the West ; 
while near the middle of the continent there is an- 
other accumulation of centers. This is claimed to be 
strictly and mystically Theosophical, because at each 
end of the magic line of effort and at its central 
point their is an accumulation of nuclei*. It is a fact 
that the branches of the Society in America are rap- 
idly running up into the first hundred. For some 
little time there existed in Washington a Branch of 
the Society called the Gnostic, but it never engaged 
in any active work. After it had been once incontin- 
ently dissolved by its president, who thereafter with- 
drew, leaving the presidency in the hands of another, 
the governing body of the American Theosophists 
formally dischartered the Gnostic, and its members 
joined other Branches. There is, however, to-day a 
Washington Branch named boldly after the much 
lauded and belittled Mme. H. P. Blavatsky, while 
the Theosophical map shows an accumulation of in- 
fluences in Washington that point to an additional 
Branch, and inquiry in official quarters discloses the 
fact that the matter is already mooted. 

The Theosophical map of which I have spoken is 
a curiosity, an anomaly in the nineteenth century. 
Few of the members are allowed to see it ; but those 
who are say that it is a register of the actual state, 
day by day, of the whole United States Section — a 
sort of weather map, with areas of pressure and Theo- 
sophical humidity in all directions. Where a Branch 
is well founded and in good condition, the spot or 
sensitive surface shows clearness and fixity. In cer- 
tain places which are in a formative condition there 
is another appearance symptomatic of a vortex that 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



5 



may soon bring forth a 'Branch ; while, wherever the 
principle of disintegration has crept into an existing 
organization, there the formerly bright and fixed 
spots grow cloudy. By means of this map, those 
who are managing the real growth of the movement 
can tell how it is going and aid it intelligently. Of 
course all this sounds ridiculous in our age; but, 
whether true or false, there are many Theosophists 
who believe it. A similar arrangement would be de- 
sirable in other branches of our civilization. 

The grand theories of the Theosophists regarding 
evolution, human races, religions and general civil- 
ation, as well as the future state of man and the 
various planets he inhabits, should engage our more 
serious attention ; and of these I propose to speak at 
another time. 



he first Echo from the burnished and mvsterious 



East which reverberated from these pages sound- 
ed the note of Universal Brotherhood. Among the 
men of this day such an idea is generally accepted as 
vague and Utopian, but one which it will do no harm 
to subscribe to ; they therefore quickly assent, and as 
quickly nullify the profession by action in the opposite 
direction. For the civilization of to-day, and especi- 
ally of the United States, is an attempt to accentuate 
and glorify the individual. The oft-repeated declara- 
tion that any born citizen may aspire to occupy the 
highest office in the gift of the nation is proof of this, 
and the Mahatmas who omard the truth through the 
ages while nations are decaying, assert that the re- 
action is sure to come in a relapse into the worst forms 
of anarchy. The only way to prevent such a relapse 
is for men to really practice the Universal Brother- 
hood they are willing to accept with the tongue. 
These exalted beings further say that all men are — 
as a scientific and dynamic fact — united, whether they 



in. 




6 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



admit it or not ; and that each nation suffers, on the 
moral as well as the physical plane, from the faults 
of all other nations, and receives benefit from the 
others also even against its will. This is due to the 
existence of an imponderable, tenuous medium which 
interpenetrates the entire globe, and in which all the 
acts and thoughts of every man are felt and impressed, 
to be afterward reflected again. Hence, say the 
Adepts, the thoughts or the doctrines and beliefs of 
men are of the higher importance, because those that 
prevail among people of a low character are just as 
much and as easily reflected upon the earth as are 
the thoughts and beliefs of persons occupying a high- 
er plane of culture. 

This is a most important tenet, if true ; for, with 
the aid of the discoveries just now admitted by science 
respecting hypnotism, we are at once able to see that 
an enormous hypnotizing machine is about. As this 
tenuous medium — called by the men of the East 
"Akasa" and by the mediaeval philosophers the 
"Astral Light" — is entirely beyond our control, we 
are at the mercy of the pictures made in it and re- 
flected upon us. 

If to this we add the wonderfully interesting doc- 
trine of Reincarnation, remembering also that the 
images made in the Astral Light persist for centuries, 
it is at once seen that upon returning again to earth- 
life we are affected for good or evil by the conduct, 
the doctrine and the aspirations of preceding nations 
and men. Returning here now, for instance, we are 
moved, without our knowledge, by the impressions 
made in the Astral Light at the time when the In- 
dians, the Spaniards and the harsh Puritans lived up- 
on the earth. The words of the immortal Shakspere— 
The evil that men do lives after them ; 
The good is oft interred with their bones, 

receive a striking exemplification under this doctrine. 
For, as the. evil thoughts and deeds are the more 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



7 



material and therefore more firmly impacted into the 
Astral Light, while the good, being spiritual, easily 
fade out, we are in effect at the mercy of the evil 
done. And the Adepts assert that Shakspere was, 
unconsciously to himself, inspired by one of their own 
number. I shall refer again to this branch of the 
subject. The scheme of evolution put forth by these 
beings and their disciples is so broad, deep and far- 
reaching as to stagger the ordinary mind. It takes 
in with ease periods of years running up^ into trillions 
and quadrillions. It claims that man has been on 
earth for millions of years more than science yet is 
willing to admit. It is not bound by the narrow 
scheme of biblical chronologists, nor startled by the 
magnificent age of civilizations which disappeared long 
ago. The keepers of this doctrine say that they and 
their predecessors lived in those older times, and have 
preserved not only the memory of them, but also 
complete records. These records, moreover, are not 
merely on perishable paper and palm leaf, but on im- 
perishable stone. They point to such remains as 
the statues twenty-seven feet high found on Easter 
Island; to rows of gigantic statues in Asia, that by 
their varying heights show the gradual diminution of 
human stature, which kept pace with other degener- 
ations ; and, to crown all, they say that they possess 
to-day in the East the immense and well guarded 
collections of records of all sorts. Not only are these 
records said to relate to the physical history of man, 
but also to his astral and spiritual evolution. 

Before closing this paper, I can only indicate one 
of their basic doctrines in the scheme of evolution. 
That is, that the evolution of the inner, astral form 
of man came first in order, and continued for an im- 
mense number of years before his physical structure 
was built up around it. This, with other portions of 
the doctrine, is vital and will aid much in an under- 
standing of the complex questions presented to us by 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



the history of the human race, both that which is 
known and that which is still resting on conjecture. 



he records to which in my last paper I referred, 



as having been kept by the Adepts and now in 
the possession of their present representatives and 
successors — Adepts also — relate not only to the birth 
of planets in this solar system, but also to the evolu- 
tion and development of man, through the various 
kingdoms of nature, until he reaches the most per- 
fect condition which can be imagined. The evolu- 
tion of the human being includes not only the genesis 
of his mortal frame, but, as well, the history of the 
inner man, whom they are accustomed to call the 
real one. 

This, then, brings us to a very interesting claim 
put forward for the Wisdom Religion, that it pre- 
tends to throw light not only upon man's emotions 
and mental faculties, but also upon his pre-natal and 
post-mortem states, both of which are of the high- 
est interest and importance. Such questions as, 
"Where have I come from?" and, "What shall be 
my condition after death?" trouble and confuse the 
minds of all men, ignorant or cultured. Priests and 
thinkers have, from time to time, formulated the- 
ories, more or less absurd, as to those pre-natal and 
post-mortem states, while the Science of to-day 
laughs in derision at the idea of making any inquiry 
into the matter whatever. Theologians have offered 
explanations, all of which relate only to what they 
suppose will happen to us after death, leaving en- 
tirely out of view and wholly unanswered the natural 
question, "What were we before we were born 
here?" And, taking them on their own ground, 
they are in a most illogical position, because, having 
once postulated immortality for the soul — the real 
man — they cannot deny immortality in either direc- 



iv. 




ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



9 



tion. If man is immortal, that immortality could 
never have had a beginning, or else it would have an 
end. Hence their only escape from the dilemma is 
to declare that each soul is a special creation. But 
this doctrine of a special creation for each soul born 
upon the earth, is not dwelt upon or expounded by 
the priests, inasmuch as it is deemed better to keep it 
discreetly in the background. 

The Wisdom Religion, on the other hand, remains 
logical from beginning to end. It declares that 
man is a spiritual being, and allows of no break 
in the chain of anything once declared immortal. 
The Ego of each man is immortal; "always was 
existent, always will be, and never can be non- 
existent;" appearing now and again, and reappear- 
ing, clothed in bodies on each occasion different, it 
only appears to be mortal ; it always remains the sub- 
stratum and support for the personality acting' upon 
the stage of life. And in those appearances as 
mortal, the questions mooted above — as to the pre- 
natal and post-mortem states — are of vital interest, 
because knowledge or ignorance concerning them al- 
ters man's thought and action while an actor on the 
stage, and it is necessary for him to know in order 
that he may so live as to aid in the grand upward 
sweep of the evolutionary wave. 

Now the Adepts have for ages pursued scientific 
experimentation "and investigation upon those lines. 
Seers themselves of the highest order, they have re- 
corded not only their own actual experiences beyond 
the veil of matter, on both sides, but have collected, 
compared, analyzed and preserved the records of ex- 
periences of the same sort by hundreds of thousands 
of lesser seers, their own disciples ; and this process 
has been going on from time immemorial. Let 
Science laugh as it may, the Adepts are the only 
true scientists, for they take into account every fac- 
tor in the question, whereas Science is limited by 



10 ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 

brain-power, by circumstance, by imperfection of in- 
struments, and by a total inability to perceive any- 
thing deeper than the mere phenomena presented by 
matter. The records of the visions and experiences 
of the greater and lesser seers, through the ages, 
are extant to-day. Of their mass, nothing has been 
accepted except that which has been checked and 
verified by millions of independent observations ; and 
therefore the Adepts stand in the position of those 
who possess actual experimental knowledge of what 
precedes the birth of the Ego in a human form, and 
what succeeds when the ''mortal coil " is cast away. 

This recording of experiences still goes on ; for the 
infinity of the changes of Nature in its evolution per- 
mits of no stoppage, no "last word," no final dec- 
laration. As the earth sweeps around the sun, it not 
only passes through new places in its orbit, but, 
dragged as it is by the sun through his greater orbit, 
involving millions of millions of years, it must in that 
larger circle enter upon new fields in space and un- 
precedented conditions. Hence the Adepts go far- 
ther yet and state that, as the phenomena presented 
by matter to-day are different from those presented a 
million years ago, so matter will in another million 
of years show different phenomena still. Indeed, 
if we could translate our sight to that time, far back 
in the past of our globe, we could see conditions and 
phenomena of the material world so different from 
those now surrounding us that it would be almost 
impossible to believe we had ever been in such a 
state as that then prevailing. And the changes 
toward the conditions that will prevail at a point 
equally remote in advance of us, in time, and which 
will be not less than those that have occurred, are in 
progress now. Nothing in the material world en- 
dures absolutely unchanged in itself or its conditions, 
even for the smallest conceivable portion of time. 
All that is, is forever in process of becoming something 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



I I 



else. This is not mere transcendentalism, but is an 
old established doctrine called, in the East, "the doc- 
trine of the constant, eternal change of atoms from 
one state into another." 



he ancient doctrine of the constant, eternal change 



1 of every atom from state to state, is founded 
upon, or rather grows out of, another which postu- 
lates that there is no such thing as dead matter. • At 
every conceivable point in the universe there are lives ; 
nowhere can be found a spot that is dead; and each 
life is forever hastening onward to higher evolution. 
To admit this, we must of course grant that matter 
is never perceived by the eye or through any instru- 
ment. It is but the phenomena of matter that we 
recognize with the senses, and hence, say the sages, 
the thing denominated "matter" by us is an illu- 
sion. Even the protoplasm of the schools is not the 
original matter ; it is simply another of the phenom- 
ena. This first original matter is called by Paracelsus 
and others primordial matter, the nearest approach 
to which in the Eastern school is found in the Sans- 
krit word mulaprakriti. This is the root of matter, 
invisible, not to be weighed, or measured, or tested 
with any instrument of human invention. And yet 
it is the only real matter underlying all the phenom- 
ena to which we erroneously give its name. But even 
it is not dead, but full of the lives first referred to. 

Now, bearing this in mind, we consider the vast 
solar system, yet vast only when not compared with 
the still greater aggregation of stars and planets 
around it. The great sidereal year covered by the 
sun in going through the twelve signs of the zodiac 
includes over 25,000 mortal years of 365 days each. 
While this immense circuit is being traversed, the 
sun drags the whole solar system with him around 
his own tremendous orbit, and we may imagine — for 



v. 




12 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



there are no observations on the point — that, while 
the 25,000 years of travel around the zodiac have 
been passing, the solar system as a whole has ad- 
vanced along the snn"s own orbit only a little distance. 
But after millions of years shall have been consumed 
in these progresses, the sun must bring his train of 
planets to stellar space where they have never been 
before; here other conditions and combinations of 
matter may very well obtain — conditions and states 
of which our scientists have never heard, of which 
there never has been recorded one single phenom- 
enon; and the difference between planetary condi- 
tions then and now will be so great that no resem- 
blance shall be observed. 

This is a branch of cyclic law with which the 
Eastern sages are perfectly familiar. They have in- 
quired into it, recorded their observations, and pre- 
served them. Having watched the uncountable lives 
during cycles upon cycles past, and seen their be- 
havior under different conditions in other stellar 
spaces long ago left behind, they have some basis 
upon which to draw conclusions as to what will be 
the state of things in ages yet to come. 

This brings us to an interesting theory offered by 
Theosophy respecting life itself as exhibited by man, 
his death and sleep. It relates also to what is gen- 
erally called "fatigue." The most usual explana- 
tion for the phenomenon of sleep is that the body 
becomes tired and more or less depleted of its vital- 
ity and then seeks repose. This, says Theosophy, is 
just the opposite of the truth, for, instead of having 
suffered a loss of vitality, the body, at the conclusion 
of the day, has more life in it than when it waked. 
During the waking state the life-waves rush into the 
body with greater intensity every hour, and, we be- 
ing unable to resist them any longer than the period 
usually observed, they overpower us and we fall 
asleep. While sleeping, the life waves adjust them- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT, 



13 



selves to the molecules of trie body ; and when the 
equilibrium is complete we again wake to continue 
the contest with life. If this periodical adjustment 
did not occur, the life current would destroy us. Any 
derangement of the body that tends to inhibit this 
adjustment is a cause of sleeplessness, and perhaps 
death. Finally, death of the body is due to the in- 
equality of the contest with the life force ; it at last 
overcomes us, and we are compelled to sink-- into the 
grave. Disease, the common property of the human 
race, only reduces the power of the body to adjust 
and resist. Children, say the Adepts, sleep more 
than adults, and need earlier repose, because the 
bodily machine, being young and tender, is easily 
overcome by life and made to sleep. 

Of course, in so short an article, I cannot elaborate 
this theory ; but, although not probably acceptable 
now to Science, it will be one day accepted as true. 
As it is beginning to be thought that electricity is 
all-pervading, so, perhaps, ere long it will be agreed 
that life is universal even in what we are used to call- 
ing dead matter. 

As, however, it is plain to any observant mind that 
there seems to be more or less intelligence in the 
operations of this life energy, we naturally approach 
another interesting Theosophical doctrine as to the 
beings and hierarchies directing this energy. 



hile studying these ancient ideas, we may as 



well prepare ourselves to have them clash with 
many long-accepted views. But since Science has 
very little save conjecture to offer when it attempts 
to solve the great problems of genesis and cosmo- 
genesis, and, in the act of denying old dogmas, al- 
most always starts with a hypothesis, the Theosophist 
may feel safe. In important matters, such as the 
heat of the sun or the history of the moon there is 



vi. 




14 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



no agreement between scientists or astronomers. 
Newton, Pouillet, Zollner, Secchi, Fizeau, Waterston, 
Rosetti, and others all differ about the sun, the di- 
vergence between their estimates of its heat being 
as high as 8,998,600 degrees. 

If we find the Adepts stating that the moon is not 
a mass thrown off from the earth in cooling, but, on 
the contrary, is the progenitor of this globe, we need 
not fear the jeers of a Science that is as uncertain 
and unsafe in many things as it is positive. 

Had I to deal only with those learned men of the 
schools who abide by the last utterance from the 
mouths of the leaders of Science, I should never at- 
tempt the task of speaking of the beings and hierar- 
chies who guide the lives of which I wrote in my 
last. My pen would drop from a hand paralyzed by 
negations. But the spiritual beliefs of the common 
people will still be in vogue when the learned mater- 
ialist has passed away. The great Immanuel Kant 
said : "I confess I am much disposed to assert the 
existence of immaterial natures in the world, and to 
place my own soul in the class of these beings. It 
will hereafter, I know not where nor when, yet be 
proved that the human soul stands, even in this life, 
in indissoluble connection with all immaterial natures 
in the spirit world, that it reciprocally acts upon 
these, and receives impressions from them." And 
the greater number of men think so also. 

That there are hierarchies ruling in the universe is 
not a new idea. It can be easily found to-day in the 
Christian Church. The early fathers taught it, St. 
Paul spoke of it, and the Roman Catholic Church has 
it clearly now in the Book of Ritual of the Spirits of 
the Stars. The four archangels who guard the four 
cardinal points represent the groups of rulers in the 
ancient system, or the heads of each group. In that 
system the rulers are named Dhyan Chohans. Al- 
though the Theosophical philosophy does not postu- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



15 



late a personal God, whether extra- or intra-cosmic, 
it cannot admit that Nature is left unaided in her 
work, but asserts that the Dhyan Chohans aid her, 
and are constantly occupied in directing the all-per- 
vading life in its evolutionary movement. Mme. 
Blavatsky, speaking on this subject in her Secret 
Doctrine, quotes from the old Book of Dzyan thus : 

"An army of the Sons of Light stands at each an- 
gle, the Lipika in the middle wheel." 

The four angles are the four quarters, and -the 
''middle wheel " is the center of space ; and that cen- 
ter is everywhere, because as space is illimitable, the 
center of it must be wherever the coornizinsr con- 
sciousness is. And the same author, using the Dis- 
ciple s Catechism, writes : 

••What is it that ever is? Space, the Anupadaka. 
What is it that ever was? The germ in the Root. 
What is it that is ev°r coming and going? The great 
Breath. Then there are three eternals? No, the 
three are one. That which ever is is one ; that which 
ever was is one ; that which is ever being and becom- 
ing is also one ; and this is space. " 

In this parentless and eternal space is the wheel in 
the center where the Lipika are, of whom I cannot 
speak; at the four angles are the Dhyan Chohans, 
and doing their will among men on this earth are 
the Adepts — the Mahatmas. The harmony of the 
spheres is the voice of the Law, and that voice is 
obeyed alike by the Dhyan Chohan and the Mahatma 
— on their part with willingness, because they are the 
law ; on the part of men and creatures because they 
are bound by the adamantine chains of the law 
which they do not understand. 

When I said that nothing could be spoken about 
the Lipika, I meant that, because of their mysterious 
nature and incomprehensible powers, it is not possi- 
ble to know enough to say anything with either sense 
or certainty. But of the Dhyan Chohans and the 



1 8 ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 

knowledge and power are exercised. In the myster- 
ious Milky- Way there are spots vast in size and incom- 
prehensibly distant, where there is room for many 
such systems as ours ; and even while we now watch 
the assemblage of stars, there is some spot among 
them where the vast night of death is spreading re- 
morselessly over a once fair system. 

Now these beings, under the sway of the law as 
they are, seem perhaps to be sometimes implacable. 
Occasions are met where to mortal judgment it 
would seem to be wise or just to save a city from de- 
struction, or a nation from decay, or a race from 
total extinction. But if such a fate is the natural re- 
sult of actions performed or a necessary step in the 
cyclic sweep, it cannot be averted. * As one of the 
Masters of this noble science has written : 

"We never pretended to be able to draw nations in 
the mass to this or that crisis in spite of the general 
drift of the world's cosmic relations. The cycles must 
run their rounds. Periods of mental and moral light 
and darkness succeed each other as day does night. 
The major and minor yugas must be accomplished 
according to the established order of things. And we, 
borne along on the mighty tide, can only modify and 
direct some of its minor currents. If we had the 
powers of the imaginary personal God, and the im- 
mutable laws were but toys to play with, then, in- 
deed, might we have created conditions that would 
have turned this earth into an Arcadia for lofty souls. " 

And so in individual cases — even among those who 
are in direct relations with some Adept — the law can- 
not be infringed. Karma demands that such and 
such a thing should happen to the individual, and the 
greatest God or the smallest Adept cannot life a finger 
to prevent it. A nation may have heaped up against 
its account as a nation a vast amount of bad Karma. 
Its fate is sure, and although it may have noble 
units in it, great souls even who are Adepts them- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



19 



selves, nothing can save it, and it will " go out like a 
torch dipped in water, " 

Such was the end of ancient Egypt, of whose 
former glory no man of this day knows aught. Al- 
though to us she appears in the historical sky as a 
full-risen sun, she yet had her period of growth, 
when mighty Adepts sat upon the throne and guided 
the people. She gradually reached a high point of 
power and then her people grew material; the 
Adepts retired ; pretended Adepts took their .place, 
and gradually her glory waned until at last the light 
of Egypt became darkness. The same story was re- 
peated in Chaldea and Assyria and also upon the sur- 
face of our own America. Here a great, a glorious 
civilization once nourished, only to disappear as the 
others did ; and that a grand development of civiliza- 
tion is beginning here again is one of the operations of 
the just and perfect law of Karma to the eye of the 
Theosophist, but one of the mysterious workings of 
an irresponsible providence to those who believe in a 
personal God who giveth the land of other men to 
the good Christian. The development of the Amer- 
ican nation has a mysterious but potent connection 
with the wonderful past of the Atlanteans, and is one 
of those great stories outlined in the book of fate by 
the Lipika to whom I referred last week. 

VIII. 

A mong the Adepts the rise and fall of nations and 
civilizations are subjects which are studied un- 
der the great cyclic movements. They hold that 
there is an indissoluble connection between man and 
every event that takes place on this globe, not only 
the ordinary changes in politics and social life, but 
all the happenings in the mineral, vegetable and ani- 
mal kingdoms. The changes in the seasons are for 
and through man ; the great upheavals of continents, 
the movements of immense glaciers, the terrific erup- 



20 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



tions of volcanoes, or the sudden overflowings of 
great rivers, are all for and through man, whether 
he be conscious of it or present or absent. And 
they tell of great changes in the inclination of the 
axis of the earth, past and to come, all due to man. 

This doctrine is incomprehensible to the Western 
nineteenth century, for it is hidden from observation, 
opposed to tradition and contradicted by education. 
But the Theosophist who has passed beyond the ele- 
mentary stages knows that it is true nevertheless. 
"What," says the worshipper of Science, "has man 
got to do with the Charleston earthquake, or with 
the showers of cosmic dust that invade our atmos- 
phere? Nothing." 

But the Adept, standing on the immeasurable 
height where centuries lie under his glance, sees the 
great cycles and the lesser ones rolling onward, in- 
fluenced by man and working out their changes for 
his punishment, reward, experience and development. 

It is not necessary now to try to make it clear how 
the thoughts and deeds of men effect any changes 
in material things ; that I will lay down for the present 
as a dogma, if you please, to be made clear later on. 

The great subject of cycles has been touched upon, 
and brings us close to a most facinating statement 
made by the Theosophical Adepts. It is this, that the 
cycles in their movement are bringing up to the sur- 
face now, in the United States and America gener- 
ally, not only a great glory of civilization which was 
forgotten eleven thousand or more years ago, but 
also the very men, the monads — the egos, as they 
call them — who were concerned so many ages since in 
developing and bringing, it to its final lustre. In 
fact, we of the nineteenth century, hearing of new 
discoveries and inventions every day, and dreaming 
of great advances in all arts and sciences, are the same 
individuals who inhabited bodies among the powerful 
and brilliant as well as wicked, Atlanteans, whose 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT, 



2 I 



name is forever set immortal in the Atlantic Ocean. 
The Europeans are also Atlantean monads ; but the 
flower, so to speak, of this revival or resurrection, is 
and is to be on the American continent. I will not 
say the United States, for mayhap, when the sun of 
our power has risen again, there may be no United 
States for it to rise upon. 

Of course, in order to be able to accept in any de- 
gree this theory, it is essential that one should be- 
lieve in the twin Theosophical doctrines of Karma 
and Reincarnation. To me it seems quite plain. I 
can almost see the Atlanteans in these citizens of 
America, sleepy, and not well aware who they are, 
but yet full of the Atlantean ideas, which are only 
prevented from full and clear expression by the in- 
herited bodily and mental environment which cramps 
and binds the mighty man within. This again is 
Xemesis-Karma that punishes us by means of these 
galling limitations, penning up our power and for the 
time frustrating our ambition. It is because, when 
we were in Atlantean bodies, we did wickedly, not the 
mere sordid wicked things of this day, but high deeds 
of evil such as by St. Paul were attributed to unknown 
spiritual beings in high places. We degraded spir- 
itual things and turned mighty powers over nature 
to base uses ; we did in excelsis that which is hinted at 
now in the glorification of wealth, of material goods, 
of the individual over the spiritual and above the 
great Man — Humanity. This has now its compensa- 
tion in our present inability to attain what we want 
or to remove from among us the grinding-stones of 
poverty. We are, as yet, only preparers, much as w T e 
may exalt our plainly crude American development. 

Herein lies the very gist of the cycle's meaning, 
It is a preparatory cycle with much of necessary de- 
struction in it ; for, before construction, we must 
have some disintegration. We are preparing here in 
America a new race which will exhibit the perfec- 



2 2 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



tion of the glories that I said were being slowly 
brought to the surface from the long forgotten past. 
This is why the Americas are seen to be in a perpet- 
ual ferment. It is the seething- and bubbling of the 
older races in the refming-pot, and the slow coming 
up of the material for the new race. Here, and no- 
where else, are to be found men and women of every 
race living together, being governed together, at- 
tacking nature and the problems of life together, 
and bringing forth children who combine, each one, 
two races. This process will go on until in the 
course of many generations there will be produced 
on the American continents an entirely new race ; 
new bodies ; new orders of intellect ; new powers of 
the mind ; curious and unheard-of psychic powers, as 
well as extraordinary physical ones ; with new senses 
and extensions of present senses now unforeseen. 
"When this new sort of body and mind are generated 
— then other monads, or our own again, will animate 
them and paint upon the screen of time the pictures 
of 100,000 years ago. 

IX. 

j n dealing with these doctrines one is compelled now 
A and then to greatly extend the scope and meaning 
of many English words. The word "race" is one 
of these. In the Theosophical scheme, as given out 
by the sages of the East, seven great races are spoken 
of. Each one of these includes all the different so- 
called races of our modern ethnology. Hence the 
necessity for having seven great root-races, sub-races, 
family races, and countless offshoot races. The root- 
race sends off sub-races, and these divide into family 
groups; all, however, being included in the great 
root-race then undergoing development. 

The appearance of these great root-races is always 
just when the world's development permits. When 
the globe was forming, the first root-race was more 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



2 3 



or less ethereal and had no such body as we now in- 
habit. The cosmic environment became more dense 
and the second race appeared, soon after which the 
first wholly disappeared. Then the third came on 
the scene, after an immense lapse of time, during 
which the second had been developing the bodies 
needed for the third. At the coming of the fourth 
root-race it is said that the present human form was 
evolved, although gigantic and in some respects dif- 
ferent from our own. It is from this point — the 
fourth race — that the Theosophical system begins to 
speak of man as such. 

The old book quoted by Mme. Blavatsky has it in 
this wise : 

' ' Thus two by two on the seven zones the third 
race gave birth to the fourth;" and, 

' ' The first race on every zone was moon-colored ; 
the second, yellow, like gold; the third, red; the 
fourth, brown, which became black with sin." 

Topinard, in his Anthropology, gives support to this, 
as he says that there are three fundamental colors in 
the human organism — red, yellow and black. The 
brown race, which became black with sin, refers to 
the Atlantean sorcerer race of which I spoke in my 
last ; its awfully evil practices, both mental and phys- 
ical, having produced a change in the color of the 
skin. 

The evolution of these seven great races covers 
many millions of years, and it must not be forgotten 
that when the new race is fully evolved the preceding 
race disappears, as the monads in it have been gradu- 
ally reincarnated in the bodies of the new race. The 
present root-race to which we belong, no matter what 
the sub-race or family we may be in, is the fifth. It 
became a separate, distinct and completely-defined 
race about one million years ago, and has yet many 
more years to serve before the sixth will be ushered 
in. This fifth race includes also all the nations in 



24 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



Europe, as they together form a family race and are 
not to be divided off from each other. 

Now, the process of forming the foundation, or 
great spinal column, for that race which is to usher 
in the sixth, and which I said is now going on m the 
Americas, is a slow process for us. Obliged as we 
are by our inability to judge or to count except by 
relativity, the gradual coming together of nations and 
the fusion of their offspring over and over again so 
as to bring forth something new in the human line, 
is so gradual as to seem almost without progress. 
But this change and evolution go on nevertheless, and 
a very careful observer can see evidences of it. One 
fact deserves attention. It is the inventive faculty 
displayed by Americans. This is not accorded much 
force by our scientists, but the Occultist sees in it an 
evidence that the brains of these inventors are more 
open to influences and pictures from the astral world 
than are the brains of the older nations. Reports 
have been brought to me by competent persons of 
children, boys and girls, who were born with most 
abnormal faculties of speech, or memory or other- 
wise, and some such cases I have seen myself. All 
of these occur in America, and many of them in the 
West. There is more nervousness here than in the 
older nations. This is accounted for by the hurry 
and rush of our civilization ; but such an explanation 
really explains nothing, because the question yet re- 
mains, ' ' Why is there such hurry and push and 
change in the United States?" Such ordinary argu- 
ments go in a circle, since they leave out of sight the 
fundamental reason, so familiar to the Theosophist, 
that it is human evolution going on right before our 
eyes in accordance with cyclic laws. 

The Theosophical Adepts believe in evolution, but 
not that sort which claims an ape as our ancestor. 
Their great and comprehensive system is quite able 
to account for rudimentary muscles and traces of or- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



25 



gans found complete only in the animal kingdom 
without having to call a pithecoid ape our father, 
for they show the gradual process of building the 
temple for the use of the divine Ego, proceeding 
ceaselessly, and in silence, through ages upon ages, 
winding in and out among all the forms in nature in 
every kingdom, from the mineral up to the highest. 
This is the real explanation of the old Jewish, Mason- 
ic and archaic saying that the temple of the Lord is 
not made with hands and that no sound of building 
is heard in it. 

x. 

It is well now to say, more definitely than I have 
* as yet, a few words of the two classes of beings, 
one of which has been much spoken of in Theosoph- 
ical literature, and also by those on the outside who 
write of the subject either in seriousness or in ridicule. 
These two classes of exalted personages are the Ma- 
hatmas and Nirmanakayas. 

In respect to the Mahatmas, a great many wrong 
notions have currency, not only with the public, but 
as well with Theosophists in all parts of the world. 

In the early days of the Theosophical Society the 
name Mahatma was not in use here, but the title 
then was "Brothers." This referred to the fact that 
they were a band of men who belonged to a brother- 
hood in the East. The most wonderful powers and, 
at times, the most extraordinary motives were attrib- 
uted to them by those who believed in their existence. 

They could pass to all parts of the world in the 
twinkling of an eye. Across the great distance that 
India is from here they could precipitate letters to 
their friends and disciples in New York. Many 
thought that if this were done it was only for amuse- 
ment ; others looked at it in the light of a test for the 
faithful, while still others often supposed Mahatmas 
acted thus for pure love of exercising their power. 



2 6 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



The Spiritualists, some of whom believed that Mme. 
Blavatsky really did the wonderful things told of 
her, said that she was only a medium, pure and sim- 
ple, and that her Brothers were familiar spooks of 
seance rooms. Meanwhile the press in general 
laughed, and Mme. Blavatsky and her Theosophical 
friends went on doing their work and never gave up 
their belief in the Brothers, who after a few years 
came to be called Mahatmas. Indiscriminately with 
Mahatma the world Adept has been used to describe 
the same beings, so that we have these two titles made 
use of without accuracy and in a misleading fashion. 

The word Adept signifies proficiency, and is not 
uncommon, so that, when using it, some description 
is necessary if it is to be applied to the Brothers. 
For that reason I used Theosophical Adepts in a pre- 
vious paper. A Mahatma is not only an Adept, but 
much more. The etymology of it will make the 
matter clearer, the word being strictly Sanskrit, from 
maha, great, and dtma, soul — hence Great Soul. This 
does not mean a noble-hearted man merely, but a 
perfected being, one who has attained to the state 
often described by mystics and held by scientific men 
to be an impossibility, when time and space are no 
obstacles to sight, to action, to knowledge or to con- 
sciousness. Hence they are said to be able to per- 
form the extraordinary feats related by various per- 
sons, and also to possess information of a decidedly 
practical character concerning the laws of nature, in- 
cluding that mystery for science — the meaning, oper- 
ation and constitution of life itself — and concerning 
the genesis of this planet as well as the races upon 
it. These large claims have given rise to the chief 
complaint brought forward against the Theosophical 
Adepts by those writers outside of the Society who 
have taken the subject up — that they remain, if they 
exist at all, in a state of cold and selfish quietude, 
seeing the misery and hearing the groans of the 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



27 



world, yet refusing to hold out a helping hand except 
to a favored few ; possessing knowledge of scientific 
principles, or of medicinal preparations, and yet 
keeping it back from learned men or wealthy capi- 
talists who desire to advance commerce while they 
turn an honest penny. Although, for one, I firmly 
believe, upon evidence given me, in all that is 
claimed for these Adepts, I declare groundless the 
complaint advanced, knowing it to be due to a want 
of knowledge of those who are impugned. 

Adepts and Mahatmas are not a miraculous growth, 
nor the selfish successors of some who, accidentally 
stumbling upon great truths, transmitted them to ad- 
herents under patent rights. They are human beings 
trained, developed, cultivated through not only a life 
but long series of lives, always under evolutionary 
laws and quite in accord with what we see among men 
of the world or of science. Just as a Tyndall is greater 
than a savage, though still a man, so is the Mahatma, 
not ceasing to be human, still greater than a Tyn- 
dall. The Mahatma-Adept is a natural growth, and 
not produced by any miracle ; the process by which 
he so becomes may be to us an unfamiliar one, but it 
is in the strict order of nature. 

Some years ago a well-known Anglo-Indian, writ- 
ing to the Theosophical Adepts, queried if they had 
ever made any mark upon the web of history, doubt- 
ing that they had. The reply was that he had no 
bar at which to arraign them, and that they had 
written many an important line upon the page of hu- 
man life, not only as reigning in visible shape, but 
down to the very latest dates when, as for many a 
long century before, they did their work behind the 
scenes. To be more explicit, these wonderful men 
have swayed the destiny of nations and are shaping 
events to-day. Pillars of peace and makers of war 
such as Bismarck, or saviors of nations such as Wash- 
ington, Lincoln and Grant, owe their elevation, their 



28 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



singular power, and their astonishing grasp upon the 
right men for their purposes, not to trained intellect 
or long preparation in the schools of their day, but 
to these very unseen Adepts, who crave no honors, 
seek no publicity and claim no acknowledgment. 
Each one of these great human leaders whom I have 
mentioned had in his obscure years what he called 
premonitions of future greatness, or connection with 
stirring events in his native land. 

Lincoln always felt that in some way he was to be 
an instrument for some great work, and the stray 
utterances of Bismarck point to silent hours, never 
openly referred to, when he felt an impulse pushing 
him to whatever of good he may have done. A 
long array of instances could be brought forward to 
show that the Adepts have made "an ineffaceable 
mark upon diverse eras." Even during the great 
uprising in India that threatened the English rule 
there, they saw long in advance the influence Eng- 
land and India would have in the affairs of the world 
through the very psychic and metaphysical changes 
of to-day, and often hastened to communicate, by 
their own occult and wonderful methods, the news of 
successes for English arms to districts and peoples in 
the interior who might have risen under the stimulus 
of imaginary reports of English disasters. At other 
times, vague fears were spread instantly over large 
masses of the Hindus, so that England at last re- 
mained master, even though many a patriotic native 
desired another result. But the Adepts do not work 
for the praise of men, for the ephemeral influence of 
a day, but for the future races and man's best and 
highest good. 

XI. 

Cor an exhaustive disquisition upon Adepts, Ma- 
hatmas and Nirmanakayas, more than a volume 
would be needed. The development illustrated by 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



29 



them is so strange to modern minds and so extraor- 
dinary in these days of general mediocrity, that the 
average reader fails to grasp with ease the views ad- 
vanced in a condensed article ; and nearly everything 
one would say about Adepts — to say nothing of the 
Nirmanakayas — requiring full explanation of recon- 
dite laws and abstruse questions, is liable to be mis- 
understood, even if volumes should be written upon 
them. The development, conditions, powers, and 
function of these beings carry with them the whole 
scheme of evolution ; for, as said by the mystics, the 
Mahatma is the efflorescence of an age. The Adepts 
may be dimly understood to-day, the Nirmanakayas 
have as yet been only passingly mentioned, and the 
Mahatmas are misconceived by believers and deni- 
ers alike. 

But one law governing them is easy to state and 
ought not to be difficult for the understanding. They 
do not, will not, and must not interfere with Karma; 
that is, however apparently deserving of help an in- 
dividual may be, they will not extend it in the man- 
ner desired if his Karma does not permit it ; and they 
would not step into the field of human thought for 
the purpose of bewildering humanity by an exercise 
of power which on all sides would be looked upon as 
miraculous. Some have said that if the Theosophic- 
al Adepts were to perform a few of their feats be- 
fore the eyes of Europe, an immense following for 
them would at once arise ; but such would not be 
the result. Instead of it there would be dogmatism 
and idolatry worse than have ever been, with a reac- 
tion of an injurious nature impossible to counteract. 

Hypnotism — though by another name — has long 
been known to them. The hypnotic condition has 
often aided the schemes of priests and churches. To 
compel recognition of true doctrine is not the way 
of these sages, for compulsion is hypnotism. To 
feed a multitude with only five loaves would be easy 



30 ECHOES FRO-\I THE ORIENT. 

for them ; but as the}- never act upon sentiment but 
continually under the great cosmic laws, they do not 
advance with present material aid for the poor in 
their hands. But, by using- their natural powers, 
they every day influence the world, not only among 
the rich and poor of Europe and America, but in 
every other land, so that what does come about in 
our lives is better than it would have been had they 
not had part therein. 

The other class referred tc — Nirmanakayas — con- 
stantly engage in this work deemed by them greater 
than earthly enterprises : the betterment of the soul 
of man, and any other good that they can accomplish 
through human agents. Around them the long-dis- 
puted question of Nirvana revolves, for all that they 
haA T e not been distinctly considered in it. For, if 
Max H tiller's view of Nirvana, that it is annihila- 
tion, be correct, than a Nirmanakaya is an impossi- 
bility. Paradoxically speaking, they are in and out 
of that state at one and the same time. They are 
owners of Nirvana who refuse to accept it in order 
that they may help the suffering orphan, Humanity. 
They have followed the injunction of the Book of the 
Golden Precepts: "Step out from sunlight into shade, 
to make more room for others." 

A greater part is taken in the history of nations by 
the Nirmanakayas than anyone supposes. Some of 
them have under their care certain men in every na- 
tion who from their birth are destined to be great 
factors in the future. These they guide and guard 
until the appointed time. And such proteges but 
seldom know that such influence is about them, es- 
pecially in the nineteenth century. Acknowledgment 
and appreciation of such great assistance are not re- 
quired by the Nirmankayas, who work behind the 
veil and prepare the material for a definite end. At 
the same time, too, one Nirmanakaya may have many 
different men — or women — whom he directs. As Pa- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



31 



tanjali puts it, "In all these bodies one mind is the 
moving - cause. " 

Strange, too, as it may seem, often such men as 
Xapoleon Buonaparte are from time to time helped 
by them. Such a being as Napoleon could not come 
upon the scene fortuitously. His birth and strange 
powers must be in the order of nature. The far- 
reaching consequences going with a nature like his, 
unmeasurable by us, must in the eastern Theosophic- 
al philosophy be watched and provided for. If he 
was a wicked man, so much the worse for him ; but 
that could never deter a Nirmanakaya from turning 
him to his uses. That might be by swerving. him, 
perchance, from a path that would have plunged the 
world into depths of woe and been made to bring 
about results in after years which Napoleon never 
dreamed of. The fear of what the world might 
think of encouraging a monster at a certain point 
never can deter a sage who sees the end that is 
best. And in the life of Napoleon there are many 
things going to show at times an influence more pow- 
erful than he could grapple. His foolhardy march to 
Moscow was perhaps engineered by these silent cam- 
paigners, and also his sudden and disastrous retreat. 
What he could have done had he remained in France, 
no present historian is competent to say. The oft- 
doubted story of the red letter from the Red Man 
just when Napoleon was in a hesitating mood, may 
have been an encouragement at a particular juncture. 
' * Whom the gods would destroy, they first make 
mad." Nor will the defeat at Waterloo be ever 
understood until the Nirmanakayas give their rec- 
ords up. 

As a change in the thought of a people who have 
been tending to gross atheism is one always desired 
by the Sages of the Wisdom Religion, it may be sup- 
posed that the wave of spiritualistic phenomena re- 
sulting now quite clearly in a tendency back to a uni- 



3-° 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



versal acknowledgment of the soul, has been aided 
by the Xirmanakayas. They are in it and of it ; they 
push on the progress of a psychic deluge over great 
masses of people. The result is seen in the litera- 
ture, the religion and the drama of to-day. Slowly 
but surely the tide creeps up and covers the once dry 
shore of Materialism, and, though priests may howl, 
demanding 1 ' the suppression of Theosophy with a 
firm hand," and a venal press may try to help them, 
they have neither the power , nor the knowledge to 
produce one backward ripple, for the Master hand is 
guided by omniscient intelligence propelled by a 
gigantic force, and — works behind the scene. 



here have been so many secret societies during 



the Christian era, by whom claims were made 
to knowledge of nature's secret la vs, that a natural 
question arises: ''In what do the Theosophic East- 
ern Sages differ from the many Rosi crucians and 
others so often heard of ?" The old bookshelves of 
Germany are full of publications upon Rosicrucian- 
ism, or by pretended and genuine members of that 
order, and to-day it is not uncommon to find those 
who have temerity enough to dub themselves " Rosi- 
crucians. " 

The difference is that which exists between reality . 
and illusion, between mere ritualism and the signs 
printed by nature upon all things and beings passing 
forever up the road to higher states of existence. 
The Rosicrucian and Masonic fraternities known to 
history rely upon outward signs and tokens to indi- 
cate the status in the order of their members, who, 
without such guarantees, are only uninitiated out- 
siders. 

But the Sages we speak of, and their disciples, 
carry with them the indelible mark and speak the 
well-known words that show they are beings devel- 



XII. 




ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



55 



oped under laws, and not merely persons who, hav- 
ing- undergone a childish ordeal, are possessed of a 
diploma. The Adepts may be called rugged oaks 
that have no disguise, while the undeveloped man 
dabbling in Masonic words and formulas is only a 
donkey wearing a lion's skin. 

There are many Adepts living in the world, all of 
whom know each other. They have means of com- 
munication unknown to modern civilization, by using- 
which they can transmit to and receive from each 
other messages at any moment and from immense 
distances, without using any mechanical means. We 
might say that there is a Society of Adepts, provided 
that we never attach to the word "society' the 
meaning ordinarily conveyed by it. It is a society 
which has no place of meeting, which exacts no dues, 
which has no constitution or by-laws other than the 
eternal laws of nature; there are no police or' spies 
attached to it and no complaints are made or receded 
in it, for the reason that any offender is punished by 
the operation of law entirely beyond his control — his 
mastery over the law being lost upon his infringing it. 

Under the protection and assistance and guidance 
of this Society of Adepts are the disciples of each 
one of its members. These disciples are divided into 
different degrees, corresponding to the various stages 
of development ; the least developed disciples are as- 
sisted by those who are in advance of them, and the 
latter in a similar manner by others, until the grade 
of disciple is reached where direct intercourse with 
the Adepts is possible. At the same time, each 
Adept keeps a supervisory eye upon all his disciples. 
Through the agency of the disciples of Adepts many 
effects are brought about in human thought and 
affairs, for from the higher grades are often sent those 
who, without disclosing their connection with mysti- 
cism, influence individuals who are known to be main 
factors in events about to occur, 



34 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



It is claimed that the Theosophical Society re- 
ceives assistance in its growth and the spreading of 
its influence from the Adepts and their accepted 
disciples. The history of the Society would seem 
to prove this, for unless there were some hidden 
but powerful force operating for its advantage it 
would have long ago sunk into obscurity, destroyed 
by the storm of ridicule and abuse to which it has 
been subjected. Promises were made, in the early 
history of the Society, that assistance would at all 
times be rendered, and prophecies were hinted that 
it would be made the target for vilification and the 
object of opposition. Both prophecies have been 
fulfilled to the letter. 

In just the same way as a polished diamond shows 
the work which gives it value and brilliancy, so the 
man who has gone through probation and teaching 
under the Adepts carries upon his person the inefface- 
able marks. To the ordinary eye untrained in this 
department, no such indications are visible ; but those 
who can see describe them as being quite prominent 
and wholly beyond the control of the bearer. For 
this reason that one who has progressed, say, three 
steps along the way,, will have three marks, and it is 
useless to pretend that his rank is a step higher, for, 
if it were, then the fourth mark would be there, 
since it grows with the being's development. Now, 
as these signatures cannot be imitated or forged, the 
whole inner fraternity has no need for concealment 
or signs. No one can commit a fraud upon or ex- 
tract from them the secrets of higher degrees by 
having obtained signs and pass-words out of a book 
or in return for the payment of fees, and none can 
procure the conferring of any advancement until the 
whole nature of the man exactly corresponds to the 
desired point of development. 

In two ways the difference between the Adept fra- 
ternity and the worldly secret societies can be seen — 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



35 



in their treatment of nations and of their own direct 
special disciples. Nothing is forced or depends upon 
favor. Everything is arranged in accordance with 
the best interests of a nation, having in view the 
cyclic influences at any time prevailing, and never 
before the proper time. When they desire to destroy 
the chains forged by dogmatism, they do not make 
the error of suddenly appearing before the aston- 
ished eyes of the people ; for they know well that 
such a course would only alter the dogmatic belief in 
one set of ideas to a senseless and equally dogmatic 
adherence to the Adepts as gods, or else create in 
the minds of many the surety that the devil was 
present. 



he training of the disciple by the teachers of the 



1 school to which the Theosophical Adepts belong 
is peculiar to itself, and not in accord with prevailing 
modern educational ideas. In one respect it is a 
specialization of the pilgrimage to a sacred place so 
common in India, and the enshrined object of the 
journey is the soul itself, for with them the existence 
of soul is one of the first principles. 

In the East the life of man is held to be a pilgrim- 
age, not only from the cradle to the grave, but also 
through that vast period of time, embracing millions 
upon millions of years, stretching from the beginning 
to the end of a Manvantara, or period of evolution, 
and as he is held to be a spiritual being, the continu- 
ity of his existence is unbroken. Nations and civili- 
zations rise, grow old, decline and disappear; but 
the being lives on, spectator of all the innumerable 
changes of environment. Starting irom the great 
All, radiating like a spark from the central fire, he 
gathers experience in all ages, under all rulers, civil- 
izations and customs, ever engaged in a pilgrimage 
to the shrine from which he came. He is now the 



XIII. 




36 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



ruler and now the slave; to-day at the pinnacle of 
wealth and power, to-morrow at the bottom of the 
ladder, perhaps in abject misery, but ever the same 
being. To symbolize this, the whole of India is dot- 
ted with sacred shrines, to which pilgrimages are 
made, and it is the wish of all men in that so-called 
benighted land to make such a journey at least once 
before death, for the religious duties of life are not 
full}' performed without visiting such sacred places. 

One great reason for this, given by those who un- 
derstand the inner significance of it, is that the places 
of pilgrimage are centers of spiritual force from 
which radiate elevating influences not perceptible to 
the pig-sticking, wine-drinking traveller. It is as- 
serted by many, indeed, that at most of the famous 
places of pilgrimage there is an Adept of the same 
order to which the Theosophical Adepts are said to 
belong, who is read}' always to give some meed of 
spiritual insight and assistance to those of pure heart 
who may go there. He, of course, does not reveal 
himself to the knowledge of the people, because it is 
quite unnecessary, and might create the necessity for 
his going elsewhere. Superstitions have arisen from 
the doctrine of pilgrimages, but, as that is quite 
likely to come about in this age, it is no reason why 
places of pilgrimage should be abolished, since, if the 
spiritual centers were withdrawn, good men who are 
free from superstition would not receive the benefits 
they now may have. The Adepts founded these 
places in order to keep alive in the minds of the peo- 
ple the soul idea which modern Science and educa- 
tion would soon turn into agnosticism, were they to 
prevail unchecked. 

But the disciple of the Adept knows that the place 
of pilgrimage symbolizes his own nature, shows him 
how he is to start on the scientific investigation of it 
and how to proceed, by what roads and in which di- 
rection, He is supposed to concentrate into a few 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 37 

lives the experience and practice which it takes ordi- 
nary men countless incarnations to acquire. His 
first steps, as well as his last, are on difficult, often 
dangerous places; the road, indeed, "winds up hill 
all the way," and upon entering it he leaves behind 
the hope for reward so common in all undertakings. 
Nothing is gained by favor, but all depends upon 
his actual merit. As the end to be reached is self- 
dependence with perfect calmness and clearness, he 
is from the beginning made to stand alone, and this 
is for most of us a difficult thing which frequently 
brings on a kind of despair. Men like companion- 
ship, and cannot with ease contemplate the possi- 
bility of being left altogether to themselves. So, in- 
stead of being constantly in the company of a lodge 
of fellow-apprentices, as is the case in the usual world- 
ly secret society, he is forced to see that, as he en- 
tered the world alone, he must learn to live there in 
the same way, leaving it is he came, solely in his own 
company. But this produces no selfishness, because, 
being accompanied by constant meditation upon the 
unseen, the knowledge is acquired that the loneliness 
felt is onlv in respect to the lower, personal, worldly 
self. 

Another rule this disciple must follow is that no 
boasting may be indulged in on any occasion, and 
this gives us the formula that, given a man who 
speaks of his powers as an Adept or boasts of his 
progress on the spiritual planes, we can be always 
sure he is neither Adept nor disciple. There have 
been those in the Theosophical Society who gave out 
to the world that they were either Adepts in fact or 
very near it, and possessed of great powers. Under 
our formula it follows that they were mere boasters, 
with nothing behind their silly pretensions but vanity 
and a fair knowledge of the weakness as well as the 
gullibility of human nature ; upon the latter they play 
for either their profit or pleasure. But, hiding them- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



selves under an exterior which does not attract at- 
tention, there are many of the real disciples in the 
world. They are studying themselves and other 
human hearts. They have no diplomas, but there 
resides in them a consciousness of constant help and 
a clear knowledge of the true Lodge which meets in 
real secrecy and is never found mentioned in any 
directory. Their whole life is a persistent pursuit of 
the fast-moving soul which, although appearing to 
stand still, can distance the lioditnin^; and their 
death is only another step forward to greater know- 
ledge through better physical bodies in new lives. 

XIV. 

j ookixg back into the past the nineteenth-century 
historian finds his sight speedily striking a mist 
and at last plunging into inky darkness. Bound 
down in fact by the influence of a ridiculous dogma- 
tism which allows only some six thousand years for 
man's life on earth, he is unwilling to accept the old 
chronologies of the Egyptians or Hindus, and, while 
permitting the assumption of vast periods for geo- 
logical changes, he is staggered by a few millions of 
}-ears more or less when they are added to the length 
of time during which humanity has peopled the 
globe. The student of Theosophy, however, sees no 
reason why he should doubt the statement made by 
his teachers on this subject. He knows that the pe- 
riods of evolution are endless. These are called 
Manvantaras, because they are between two Manus, 
or, two men. 

These periods may be called waves whose succes- 
sion has no cessation. Each grand period, including 
within it all the minor evolutions, covers 311,040.- 
000.000,000 human years; under a single Manu the 
human years come and go, 306.720.000 in number, 
and the lesser yugas — or ages — more immediately 
concerning us, comprise of solar years 4,320,000. 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIEXT. 



39 



During these solar revolutions the human races sweep 
round and round this planet. Cave-dwellers, lake- 
dwellers and those of a neolithic or any other age 
appear and disappear over and over again, and in 
each of those we who now read, write and think of 
them were ourselves the very Egos whose past we 
are trying to trace. 

But. going deep into geological strata, the doubt of 
man's existence contemporaneously with the plesio- 
saurus arises because no fossil genus homo is discov- 
ered in the same stratum. It is here that the 
theories of the Theosophist come in and furnish the 
key. Those hold that before man developed any 
physical body he clothed himself with an astral form ; 
and this is why H. P. Blavatsky writes in her Secret 
Doctrine: "it teaches the birth of the astral before 
the physical body, the former being the model for the 
latter." At the time of the huge antediluvian ani- 
mals they absorbed in their enormous bodies so 
much of the total quantity of gross matter available 
for frames of sentient beings that the astral man re- 
mained without a corporeal frame, as yet unclothed 
"with coats of skin." For this reason he could ex- 
ist in the same place with those huge birds and rep- 
tiles without fear. Their massive proportions in- 
spired him with no terror, and by their consumption 
of food there was no lessening of his sustenance. 
And, therefore, being of such a composition that he 
left no impression upon mud or plastic rock, the 
death of one astral body after another left no fossil 
and no mark to be unearthed by us in company with 
the very beasts and birds which were his contem- 
poraries. 

Man was all this time acquiring the power to clothe 
himself with a dense frame. He threw off astral 
bodies one after another, in the ceaseless pursuit, 
each effort giving him a little more density. Then 
he began to cast a shadow, as it were, and the vast, 



4 o 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



unwieldy animal world — and others as well — felt 
more and more the draughts made upon it by the 
coming man. As he thickened they grew smaller, 
and his remains could not be deposited in any stratum 
until such time as he had grown to sufficient hard- 
ness. But our modern anthropologists have not yet 
discovered when that was. They are ready enough 
to make definite statements, but, learned as they are, 
there are surprises awaiting them not so far off. 

While, therefore, our explorers are finding, now 
and then, the remains of animals and birds and rep- 
tiles in strata which show an age far greater than 
any assigned to the human race, they never come 
upon human skeletons. How could man leave any 
trace at a stage when he could not press himself into 
the clay or be caught by soft lava or masses of vol- 
canic dust? I do not mean, however, to say that the 
period of the plesiosaurus is the period of the man 
of astral body devoid of a material one. The ques- 
tion of exact period may well be left for a more de- 
tailed account ; this is only to point to the law and to 
the explanation for the non-appearance of man's re- 
mains in very early geologic strata. But the The- 
osophic Adepts insist that there are still in the earth 
bony remains of man, which carry his first appear- 
ance in a dense body many millions of years farther 
back than have yet been admitted, and these remains 
will be discovered by us before much time shall have 
rolled away. 

One of the first results of these discoveries will be 
to completely upset the theory as to the succession of 
ages, as I may call it, which is given and accepted at 
the present time, and also the estimation of the va- 
rious civilizations that have passed from the earth and 
left no trace except in the inner constitution of our- 
selves — for it is held that we are those very persons, now 
in different bodies, who so long ago lived and loved 
and died upon the planet. We began to make Karma 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



41 



then and have been under its influence ever since, 
and it seems fitting that that great doctrine should 
be taken up at another time for a more careful exam- 
ination. 



he Oriental doctrine of reward and punishment of 



1 the human Ego is very different from the the- 
ological scheme accepted throughout Christendom, 
since the Brahmins and Buddhists fix the place of 
punishment and compensation upon this earth of 
ours, while the Christian removes the "bar of God" 
to the hereafter. We may not profitably stop to 
argue upon logic with the latter ; it will be sufficient 
to quote to them the words of Jesus, St. Matthew, 
and the Psalmist. " With what measure ye mete, it 
shall be measured unto you again," said Jesus; and 
Matthew declares that for every word, act, and 
thought we shall have to answer, while David, the 
royal poet, sang that those who serve the Lord should 
never eat beggar's bread. We all know well that the 
first two declarations do away with the vicarious 
atonement; and as for the Jewish singer's notion, it 
is negatived every day in any city of either hemi- 
sphere. 

Among the Ceylonese Buddhists the name of the 
doctrine is Kamma; with the Hindus it is Karma. 
Viewed in its religious light, it "is the good and bad 
deeds of sentient beings, by the infallible influence 
or efficacy of which those beings are met with due 
rewards or punishment, according as they deserve, 
in any state of being."* When a being dies, he 
emits, as it were, a mass of force or energy, which 
goes to make up the new personality when he shall 
be reincarnated. In this energy is found the sum- 
mation of the life just given up, and by means of 

* The Rev. T P. Terunnanse, High-Priest at Dodanduwa, 
Ceylon. 



XV. 




42 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



it the Ego is forced to assume that sort of body 
among those appropriate circumstances which to- 
gether are the means for carrying out the decrees of 
Karma. 

Hence hell is not a mythical place or condition af- 
ter death in some unknown region specially set apart 
by the Almighty for the punishment of his children, 
but is in very truth our own globe, for it is on the 
earth, in earth-lives experienced in human bodies, 
that we are punished for bad deeds previously done, 
and meet with happiness and pleasure as rewards for 
old merit. 

When one sees, as is so common, a good man suf- 
fering much in his life, the question naturally arises, 
"Has Karma anything to do with it, and is it just 
that such a person should be so afflicted?" For those 
who believe in Karma it is quite just, because this 
man in a previous life must have done such acts as 
deserve punishment now. And, similarly, the wicked 
man who is free from suffering, happy and pros- 
perous, is so because in a previous existence he had 
been badly treated by his fellows or had experienced 
much suffering. And the perfect justice of Karma 
is well illustrated in his case because, although now 
favored by fortune, he, being wicked, is generating 
causes which, when he shall be reborn, will operate 
then to punish him for his evil-doing now. 

Some may suppose that the Ego should be pun- 
ished after death, but such a conclusion is not logical. 
For evil deeds committed here on the objective plane could 
not with any scientific or moral propriety be punished on a 
plane which is purely subjective. And such is the reason 
why so many minds, both of the young and old, have 
rejected and rebelled against the doctrine of a hell- 
fire in which they would be eternally punished for 
commission of sin on earth. Even when unable to 
formulate the reason in metaphysical terms, they in- 
stinctively knew that it would be impossible to re- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



43 



move the scene of compensation from the very place 
where the sin and confusion had been done and 
created. When the -disciples of Jesus asked him if 
the man who was born blind was thus brought into 
the world for some sin he had committed they had in 
mind this doctrine of Karma, just as all the Hindus 
and Buddhists have when they see some of their fel- 
lows crippled or deformed or deprived of sight. 

The theory above hinted at of the person at death 
throwing out from himself the new personality, so to 
speak, ready to await the time when the Ego should 
return to earth seeking a new body, is a general law 
that operates in a great many other instances besides 
the birth or death of a being. It is that which is 
used by the Theosophists to explain the relations be- 
tween the moon and the earth. For, as the moon is 
held by them to be the planet on which we lived be- 
fore reaching the earth and before there was • any 
such earth whatever; and that, when our so-called 
satellite came to die, all the energy contained in it 
was thrown out into space, where in a single vortex 
it remained until the time came for that energy to be 
again supplied with a body — this earth — so the same 
law prevails with men, the single units in the vast 
aggregate which is known among advanced Theos- 
ophists as the great Manu. Men being, as to their 
material envelope, derived from the moon, must fol- 
low the law of their origin, and therefore the Bud- 
dhist priest says, as quoted: "At the death of a 
being nothing goes out from him to the other world 
for his rebirth ; but by the efficacy — or, to use a more 
figurative expression, by the ray — of influence which 
Kamma emits, a new being is produced in the other 
world very identical with the one who died away," 
for in this "new being" is held all the life of the 
deceased. The term "being," as applied to it may 
be taken by us with some qualification. It is more 
properly a mass of energy devoid of conscience and 



44 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



crowded with desires of the person from whom it ema- 
nated ; and its special province is to await the return 
of the individuality and form for that the new body in 
which it shall suffer or enjoy. Each man is therefore 
his own creator under the great Cosmic laws that 
control all creations. A better term in place of 
"creation" is "evolution," for we, from life to life, 
are engaged in evolving out of the material provided 
in this Manvantara new bodies at every turn of the 
wheel of rebirth. The instruments we use in this 
work are desire and will. Desire causes the will to 
fix itself on objective life; in that plane it produces 
force and out of that comes matter in its objective 
form. 



ery many Western people say that this Oriental 



doctrine of Karma is difficult to understand, be- 
ing fit only for educated and thoughtful persons. But 
in India, Ceylon and Burmah, not to mention other 
Asiatic countries, the whole mass of the people ac- 
cept and seem to understand it. The reason for this 
lies probably in the fact that they also firmly believe 
in Reincarnation, which may be said to be the twin 
doctrine to Karma. Indeed, the one cannot be prop- 
erly considered without keeping the other in view, 
for Karma — whether as punishment or reward — could 
have no actual or just operation upon the Ego unless 
the means for its operation were furnished by Rein- 
carnation. 

Our deserts are meted out to us while we are asso- 
ciating in life with each other, and not while we are 
alone, nor in separateness. If being raised to power 
in a nation or becoming possessed of wealth is called 
a reward, it would lose all value were there no people 
to govern and no associated human beings with and 
upon whom we could spend our wealth and who 
might aid us in satisfying our manifold desires. And 



XVI. 




ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



45 



so the law of Reincarnation drags us into life again 
and again, bringing with us uncounted times the va- 
rious Egos whom we have known in prior births. 
This is in order that the Karma — or causes — gener- 
ated in company with those Egos may be worked 
out, for to take us off separately into an unknown 
hell, there to receive some sort of punishment, or into 
an impossible serio-comic heaven to meet our reward, 
would be as impossible as unjust. Hence, no just- 
hanged murderer absolved by priest or praising J.esus 
can escape. He, together with his victim, must re- 
turn to this earth, each to aid the other in adjusting 
the disturbed harmony, during which process each 
makes due compensation. With this doctrine we re- 
store justice to her seat in the governance of men, 
for without it the legal killing of the murderer after 
condemnation is only a half remedy, since no pro- 
vision is made by the State for the being hurled out 
of the body nor for the dependants he may have left 
behind, and, still further, nothing is done for those 
who in the family of the murderer survive him. 

But the Theosophical sages of all ages push the 
doctrine of Karma beyond a mere operation upon in- 
carnated men. They view all worlds as being bound 
together and swayed by Karma. As the old Hindu 
book, the Bhagavad-Gitd, says, "all worlds up to 
that of Brahma are subject to Karma." Hence it 
acts on all planes. ■ So viewing it, they say that this 
world as it is now conditioned is the actual result of 
what it came to be at the beginning of the pralaya 
or grand death which took place billions upon billions 
of years ago. That is, the world evolves just as man 
does. It is born, it grows old, it dies, and it is rein- 
carnated. This goes on many times, and during 
those incarnations it suffers and enjoys in its own way 
for its previous evolutions. For it the reward is a 
greater advance along the line of evolution, and the 
punishment is a degraded state. Of course, as I said 



4 6 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



in a former article, these states have man for their 
object and cause, for he is the crown of all evolution. 
And, coming down from the high consideration of 
great cosmic spaces and phenomena, the Theosophist 
is taught to apply these laws of Karma and Reincar- 
nation to every atom in the body in especial and apart 
from the total Karma. Since we are made up of a 
mass of lives, our thoughts and acts affect those atoms 
or lives and impress them with a Karma of their own. 
As the Oriental thinkers say, 4 ' not a moment passes 
without some beings coming to life in us, acquiring 
Karma, dying, and being reincarnated. " 

The principal divisions of Karma are three in num- 
ber. One sort is that now operating in the present 
life and body, bringing about all the circumstances 
and changes of life. Of this we see illustrations 
every day, with now and then strange climaxes which 
throw upon the doctrine the brightest light. One 
such is immortalized in India by a building erected 
by the favored son of fortune, as we would say, and 
thus it came about. A Rajah had a very strange 
dream, so affecting that he called upon his sooth- 
sayers for interpretation. They said that their hor- 
oscopes showed he was required next day to give an 
immense sum of money to the first person he should 
see after awaking, their intention being to present 
themselves at an early hour. Next day the King 
arose unusually early, stepped to his window, threw 
it open, and there before him was a chandalah sweep- 
ing up the dirt. To him he gave a fortune, and thus 
in a moment raised him to affluence from abject pov- 
erty. The chandalah then built a huge building to 
commemorate his sudden release from the grinding 
chains of poverty. 

Another class of Karma is that which is held over 
and not now in operation because the man does not 
furnish the appropriate means for bringing it into 
action. This may be likened to vapor held in sus- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



47 



pension in the atmosphere and not visible to the eye, 
but which will fall as rain upon the earth the moment 
conditions are ripe. 

The last chief class is that Karma which we are 
making now, and which will be felt by us in future 
births. Its appropriate symbol is the arrow shot for- 
ward in the air by the archer. . 



he spirit is not affected by Karma at any time or 



1 under any circumstances, and so the Theosoph- 
ical Adepts would not use the terms "cultivation of 
the Spirit." The Spirit in man, called by them Ish- 
wara, is immutable, eternal and indivisible — the fun- 
damental basis of ail. Hence they say that the body 
and all objects are impermanent and thus deluding 
to the soul whenever they are mistaken for reality. 
They are only real on and for this plane and during 
the time when the consciousness takes them up here 
for cognition. They are therefore relatively real 
and not so in an absolute sense. This can easily 
be proved from dreams. In the dream state we lose 
all knowledge of the objects which while awake we 
thought real and proceed to suffer and enjoy in that 
new state. In this we find the consciousness apply- 
ing itself to objects partaking of course of the nature 
of the experiences of the waking condition, but at 
the same time producing the sensations of pleasure 
and pain while they last. Let us imagine a person's 
body plunged in a lethargy extending over twenty 
years and the mind undergoing a pleasant or un- 
pleasant dream, and we have a life just of that sort, 
altogether different from the life of one awake. For 
the consciousness of this dreamer the reality of ob- 
jects known during the waking state is destroyed. 
But as material existence is a necessary evil and the 
one in which alone emancipation or salvation can be 
obtained, it is of the greatest importance and hence 



XVII. 




48 ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 

Karma which governs it and through whose decrees 
emancipation may be reached must be well under- 
stood and then be accepted and obeyed. 

Karma will operate to produce a deformed or de- 
ficient body, to give in a good body a bad disposition 
or vice versa; it will cause diseases, hurts or annoy- 
ances, or bring about pleasures and favorable situa- 
tions for the material frame. So we sometimes find 
with a deformed or disagreeable body a most en- 
lightened and noble mind. In this case the physical 
Karma is bad and the mental good. 

This leads us to the sort of Karma that works 
upon the mental plane. At the same time that an 
unfavorable Karmic cause is showing forth in the 
physical structure another and better sort is working 
out in the mind and disposition or has eventuated in 
conferring a mind well balanced, calm, cheerful, 
deep, and brilliant. Hence we discovor a purely 
physical as compared with an entirely mental Karma. 
Purely physical would be that resulting, say from a 
removal from the ground of fruit peel which might 
otherwise cause some unknown person to fall and be 
hurt. Purely mental might be due to a life spent in 
calm, philosophical thought and the like. 

There is in one of the Hindu books a strange sen- 
tence respecting this part of the subject, reading: 
4 ' Perfection of body or superhuman powers are pro- 
duced by birth or by herbs or by incantations, pen- 
ances, or meditations." 

Among mental afflictions esteemed as worse than 
any bodily hurt or loss is that Karma from a preced- 
ing life which results in obscurity of such a character 
that there is a loss of all power to conceive of the 
reality of Spirit or the existence of soul — that is, ma- 
terialism. 

The last field of operation for this law may be said 
to be the psychical nature. Of this in America we 
have numerous examples in mediums, clairvoyants, 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



clairaudients, mind-readers, hysteriacs, and all sorts 
of abnormal sensitives. There could be no clair- 
voyant according to the Oriental scheme if the person 
so afflicted, using as I think the proper term, had not 
devoted much of previous lives to a one-sided de- 
velopment of the psychical nature resulting now in 
powers which make the possessor an abnormality in 
society. 

A very strange belief of the Hindus is that one 
which allows the possibility of a change of state by 
a mortal of such a character that the once man be- 
comes a Deva or lesser god. They divide nature into 
several departments, in each of which are conscious 
powers or entities called Devas, to put it roughly. 
Yet this is not so far apart from the ideas of some of 
our best scientific men who have said there is no 
reason why in each ray of the spectrum there may 
not be beings to us unseen. Many centuries ago the 
Hindu thinker admitted this, and pushing further on 
declared that a man might through a certain sort of 
Karma become one of these beings, with correspond- 
ing enjoyment and freedom from care, but with the 
certainty, however, of eventually changing back 
again to begin the weary round of birth over again. 

What might be called the doctrine of the nullifi- 
cation of Karma is an application in this department 
of the well-known law in physics which causes an 
equilibrium when two equal forces oppose each other. 
A man may have in his Karmic account a very un- 
pleasant cause and at the same time a cause of op- 
posite character. If these come together for ex- 
pression at the same time they may so counteract 
each other as that neither will be apparent and the 
equilibrium is the equivalent of both. In this way 
it is easy to understand the Biblical verse: Charity 
covereth a multitude of sins," as referring to the pal- 
liative effect of charitable deeds as opposed to deeds 
of wickedness, and giving a reason for the mediaeval 



5° 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



knight devoting some of the years of his life to alms- 
giving. 

In the Bhagavad-Gttd, a book revered by all in 
India, the highest place is given to what is called 
Karma- Yoga or the Religion of the Performance of 
Works and Duty, and there it is said: " He who, un- 
attached to the fruits of his actions, performs such 
actions as must be done, is both renouncer and dev- 
otee ; not he who kindles no sacrificial fires and per- 
forms no ceremonies. He who remains inert, re- 
straining the organs of action, and pondering with 
his heart on objects of sense, is called a false pietist 
of bewildered soul. But he who, restraining his 
senses by his heart and being free from interest in 
acting, undertakes active devotion through the or- 
gans of action, is praiseworthy." 



hat the doctrine of Karma is unjust, unsympa- 



thetic, and fatalistic has been claimed by those 
who oppose it, but such conclusions are not borne 
out by experience among those races who believe in 
it, nor will the objections stand a close examination. 
The Hindus and Buddhists thoroughly believe in 
Karma, convinced that no one but themselves pun- 
ishes or rewards in this or any life, yet we do not find 
them cold or unsympathetic. Indeed, in the rela- 
tions of life it is well known that the Hindu is as lov- 
ing and tender as his American brother, and there 
are as many instances of heroic self-sacrifice in their 
history as in ours. Some go further than this and 
say that the belief in Karma and Reincarnation has 
made the Hindu more gentle in his treatment of men 
and animals than are the Europeans, and more spir- 
itual in his daily life. Going deeper into their his- 
tory, the belief in Karma is found side by side with 
material works of great magnitude, and whose re- 
mains to this day challenge our wonder, admiration, 



XVIII. 




ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



5 1 



and respect; it is doubtful whether we could ever 
show such triumphs over nature as can be seen at any 
time in the rock-cut temples of Hindustan. So it 
would appear that this doctrine of ours is not likely 
to produce bad or enervating effects upon the people 
who accept it. 

" But," says an objector, "it is fatalism. If Kar- 
ma is Karma, if I am to be punished in such aud such 
a manner, then it will come about so whether I will or 
not, and hence I must, like the Turk, say 'Kismet,', 
and do nothing." Now, although the Mohammed- 
an doctrine of Kismet has been abused as fatalism, 
pure and simple, it was not so held by the Prophet 
nor by his greatest disciples, for the}' taught that it 
was law and not fate. And neither is Karma ame- 
nable to this objection. In the minds of those who, 
having vaguely apprehended Karma as applying to 
one life only, do not give the doctrine its true majestic, 
endless sweep, fatalism is the verdict. When, on the 
other hand, each man is seen as the fashioner of the 
fate for his next fleeting earth personality, there can 
be no fatality in it, because in his own hand is the 
decree. He set in motion the causes which will in- 
evitably have certain results. Just as easily he could 
have made different causes and thus brought about 
different results. 

- That there are a repellant coldness and want of 
tenderness in a doctrine which thus deals out inflex- 
ible justice and compels us to forever lose our friends 
and beloved relatives, once death has closed the door, 
is the feeling of a few who make sentiment their 
rule in life. But while sentiment and our own wishes 
are not the guiding laws of nature, there is no reason 
even on the sentimental ground for this objection; it 
is due to a partial knowledge of the doctrine which, 
when fully known, is found to be as full of opportun- 
ity for the exercise of what is dear to the heart as 
any other theory of life. The same law that throws 



52 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



us into life to suffer or enjoy, as may be deserved, 
decrees that the friends and the relatives who are 
like unto each other must incarnate together, until 
by reason of differentiation of character they cannot 
under any law of attraction remain in company. Not 
unless and until they become different do they separ- 
ate from each other. And who would wish to be 
eternally tied to the side of uncongenial relatives or 
acquaintances merely because there was an accident 
of birth! 

For our aid also this law works well and cease- 
lessly. ' ' Those whom you help will help you in 
other lives, " is the declaration. In ages past perhaps 
we knew those who long since have passed up to 
greater heights. The very moment in the long series 
of incarnations we come near to where they are pur- 
suing their pilgrimage, they at once extend assist- 
ance, whether that be on the material or moral 
planes. And it makes no difference whether one or 
the other is aware of who is assisting or who is being 
assisted. Inflexible law guides the current and brings 
about the result. Thus the members of the whole 
human family reciprocally act on one another, forced 
into it by a law which is as kind as it is great, which 
turns the contempt we bore in the past into present 
honor and opportunity to help our fellows. 

There is no favoritism possible in nature; no man 
has any privilege or gift which he has not deserved, 
either as a reward or a compensation. Looking at 
the present life spread before our limited vision, we 
may see perhaps no cause why there should be any 
such reward to an unworthy man, but Karma never 
errs a ad will surely repay. And it not only rewards, 
but to it solely belong those compensations which we 
with revenge attempt to mete out. It is with this in 
view that the holy writ of the Christians says, "Ven- 
geance is mine; I will repay," for so surely as one 
hurts another so is the certainty of Karma striking 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



55 



the offender ; — but let the injured one beware that he 
does not desire the other punished, for by Karma 
will he be punished also. So from all this web of 
life and ceaselessly revolving wheel, Karma furnishes 
the escape and the means of escape, and. by reincar- 
nation we are given the time for escape. 

XIX. 

Jn the Egyptian Book of the Dead, chapter x describes 
the place where, after death, disembodied souls 
remain in different degrees of perfection. Some 
are shown as taking wheat three cubits high, while 
others are only permitted to glean it — "he gleaned 
the fields of Aanroo. " Thus some enjoy the perfec- 
tion of spiritual bliss, while others attain only to 
minor degrees in that place or state where divine 
justice is meted out to the soul. 

Devachan is the land of reward; the domain of 
spiritual effects. The word spiritual here refers to 
disembodiment , it must only be used as relative to 
our material existence. The Christian demonstrates 
this fact by the material entourage of his heaven. In 
the Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky says: "Death 
itself is unable to deliver man from it [Karma], since 
death is simply the door through which he passes to 
another life on earth, after a little rest on its thresh- 
old — Devachan." Devachan, then, is the threshold 
of life. In the Hindu system it is etymologically the 
place of the gods, Indra's heaven. Indra is the re- 
gent of heaven, who gives to those who can reach 
his realm long-enduring gifts of happiness and do- 
minion. The Bhavagad-Gitd says : " After enjoying 
felicity for innumerable years in the regions of In- 
dra, he is born again upon this earth. " 

For the purpose of this article, we assume that the 
entire man, minus the body, goes into Devachan. 
This, however, is not so. The post-mortem division of 
our sevenfold constitution given by Theosophy is 



54 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



exact. It exhibits the basis of life, death and rein- 
carnation. It shows the composite being, man, in 
analogy with that other composite being, nature. 
Both are a unity in diversity. Man, suspended in 
nature, like her, divides and reunites. This seven- 
fold division will be treated in a future article. 

Devachan, being a state of prolonged subjective 
happiness after the death of the body, is plainly the 
heaven of the Christian, but with a difference. It 
is a heaven made scientifically possible. Heaven it- 
self must accord with the divine laws projected into 
nature. As sleep is a release from the body, during 
which we have dreams, so death is a complete sepa- 
ration and release, after which in Devachan we dream 
until, on beino - ao-ain incarnated in a new bodv on 
earth, we come once more into what we call* waking 
existence. Even the human soul would weary of the 
ceaseless round of rebirths, if some place or state 
were not provided in which rest could be obtained; 
in which germinating aspirations, restricted by earth- 
life, could have their full development. No energy 
can be annihilated, least of all a psychic energy; 
these must somewhere find an outlet. It is found 
in Devachan ; this realization is the rest of the soul. 
Its deepest desires, its highest needs are there en- 
joyed. There every hope blooms out in full and 
glorious flower. To prolong this blissful state, Hin- 
du books give many incantations and provide innu- 
merable ceremonies and sacrifices, all of them hav- 
ing for end and aim a long stay in Devachan. The 
Christian does precisely the same. He longs for 
heaven, prays that he may go there, and offers up to 
his God such propitiatory rites and acts as seem best 
to him, the only difference being that he does not do 
it half so scientifically as the Hindu. The Hindu, is 
also more vivid in his conception of this heaven than 
the Christian is. He postulates many places or con- 
ditions adapted to the energic and qualitative differ- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



55 



ences between souls. Kama-loka and other states 
are where concrete desires, restricted by life in the 
body, have full expression, while in Tribuvana the 
abstract and benevolent thinkers absorb the joys of 
lofty thought. The orthodox heaven has no such 
proviso. It also ignores the fact that a settled mo- 
notony of celestial existence would exhaust the soul 
— would be stagnation, not growth. Devachanic life 
is development of aspiration, passing through the 
various stages of gestation, birth, cumulative growth, 
downward momentum and departure to another con- 
dition, all rooted in joy. There is nothing in the 
mere fact of death to mould a soul anew. It is a 
group of psychic energies, and heaven must have 
something in common with these, or why should it 
gravitate there? Souls differ as men do. In Deva- 
chan each one receives that degree of bliss which 
it can assimilate; its own development determines 
its reward. The Christian places all the snuffy old 
saints as high as other holy souls, sinking genius to 
the level of the mediocre mass, while the Hindu 
gives infinite variety of occupation and existence 
suited to grave and gay, the soul of genius or of 
poetry. No one sits in undesired seats, nor sings 
psalms he never liked, nor lives in a city which might 
pall upon him if he were forever compelled to walk 
its pearly streets. The laws of cause and effect for- 
bid that Devachan should be monotonous. Results 
are proportionate to antecedent energies. The soul 
oscillates between Devachan and earth-life, finding 
in each conditions suited to its continuous develop- 
ment, until, through effort, it reaches a perfection in 
which it ceases to be the subject of the laws of action 
and reaction, becoming instead their conscious co- 
worker. 

Devachan is a dream, but only in the sense in 
which objective life can be called such. Both last 
until Karma is satisfied in one direction, and begins 



56 ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 

to work in the other. The Devachanee has no idea 
of space or time except such as he makes for him- 
self. He creates his own world. He is with all he 
ever loved, not in bodily companionship, but in one 
to him real, close and blissful. When a man dies, 
the brain dies last. Life is still busy there after 
death has been announced. The soul marshals up 
all past events, grasps the sum total, the average 
tendency stands out, the ruling hope is seen. Their 
final aroma forms the keynote of Devachanic exis- 
tence. The lukewarm man goes neither to heaven 
nor hell. Nature spews him out of her mouth. Pos- 
itive conditions, objective or subjective, are only 
reached through positive impulsion. Devachanic dis- 
tribution is governed by the ruling motive of the 
soul. The hater may, by reaction, become the 
lover, but the indifferent have no propulsion, no 
growth. 

xx. 

|t is quite evident to the unprejudiced inquirer that 
Christian priests for some reason or other studi- 
ously ignore the composite nature of man, although 
their great authority, St. Paul, clearly refers to it. 
He spoke of body, soul, and spirit, they only preach 
of body and soul; he declared we had a spiritual 
body, they remain misty as to the soul's body and 
cling to an absurd resurrection of the material cask- 
et. It became the duty of Theosophists to draw the 
attention of the modern mind once more to the Ori- 
ental division of man's constitution, for through that 
alone can an understanding of his state before and 
after death be attained. The division laid down by 
St. Paul is threefold, the Hindu one is of a sevenfold 
character. St. Paul's is meant for those who require 
broad outlines, but do not care to inquire into details. 
Spirit, soul, and body, however, include the whole 
.seven divisions, the latter being a more complete an- 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



57 



alysis; and it is suspected by many deep thinkers 
that Paul knew the ccmplete system but kept it back 
for good reasons of his own. 

An analysis of body discloses more than mere mo- 
lecular structure, for it shows a force or life or power 
that keeps it together and active throughout its nat- 
ural period. Mr. Sinnett, in his Esoteric Buddhism, 
attempting to bring to his countrymen some know- 
ledge of the Eastern system, called this Prdna or 
Jiva; others, however, call it Prdna alone, which 
seems more appropriate, because the human as- 
pect of the life force is dependent upon Prdna, or 
breath. 

The spirit of St. Paul may be taken for our pur- 
poses to be the Sanskrit Atmd. Spirit is universal, 
indivisible, and common to all. In other words, there 
are not many spirits, one for each man, but solely 
one spirit which shines upon all men alike, finding as 
many souls — roughly speaking — as there are beings 
in the world. In man the spirit has a more complete 
instrument or assemblage of tools with which to 
work. This spiritual identity is the basis of the phi- 
losophy; upon it the whole structure rests; to indi- 
vidualize spirit, assigning to each human being his 
own spirit, particular to him and separate from the 
spirit of any other man, is to throw to the ground 
the whole Theosophic philosophy, will nullify its 
ethics and defeat its object. 

Starting, then, with Atmd — spirit — as including the 
whole, being its basis and support, we find the Hindu 
offering the theory of sheaths or covers of the soul 
or inner man. These sheaths are necessary the mo- 
ment evolution begins and visible objects appear, so 
that the aim of the soul may be attained in conjunc- 
tion with nature. In this way, through a process 
which would be out of place here, a classification is 
arrived at by means of which the phenomena of life 
and consciousness may be explained. 



58 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



The six vehicles (adopting Mr. Sinnett's nomen- 
clature) used by the spirit and by means of which 
the Ego gains experience are : 

Body, as a gross vehicle. 

Vitality, or Prdna. 

Astral Body, or Linga (^arira. 

Animal Soul, or Kama Rtlpa. 

Human Soul, or Manas. 

Spiritual Soul, or Buddhi. 

The Linga (^arira is needed as a more subtle body 
than the corporeal frame, because the latter is in 
fact only stupid, inert matter. Kama Rilpa is the 
body, or collection, of desires and passions; Manas 
may be properly called the mind, and Buddhi is the 
highest intellection beyond brain or mind. It is that 
which discriminates. 

At the death of the body, Prdna flies back to the 
reservoir of force ; the astral body dissipates after a 
longer period and often returns with Kama Rupa 
when aided by certain other forces to seance-rooms, 
where it masquerades as the deceased, a continual 
lie and ever-present snare. The human and the spir- 
itual soul go into the state spoken of before as Deva- 
chan or heaven, where the stay is prolonged or short 
according to the energies appropriate to that state 
generated during earth-life. When these begin to 
exhaust themselves the Ego is gradually drawn back 
to earth-life, where through human generation it 
takes up a new body, with another astral body, vital- 
ity, and animal soul. 

This is the ''wheel of rebirth," from which no 
man can escape unless he conforms to true ethics and 
acquires true knowledge and consciousness while 
living in a body. It was to stop this ceaselessly re- 
volving wheel that Buddha declared his perfect law, 
and it is the aim of the true Theosophist to turn his 
great and brilliant "Wheel of the Law" for the heal- 
ing of the nations. 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



59 



XXI. 

j_J igh in the esteem of the Hindu stands the ser- 
* pent, both as a symbol and a creature. Moving 
in a wavy line, he figures the vast revolution of the 
Sun through eternal space carrying the rapidly whirl- 
ing Earth in her lesser orbit ; periodically casting his 
skin, he presents a visible illustration of renewal of 
life or reincarnation ; coiling to strike, he shows the 
working of the law of Karma-Nemesis which, with 
a basis in our actions, deals an unerring blow. As a 
symbol with tail in mouth, forming a circle,- he rep- 
resents eternity, the circle of necessity, all-devouring 
Time. For the older Initiates he spoke to them also 
of the astral light which is at once devilish and divine. 

Probably in the whole field of Theosophic study 
there is nothing so interesting as the astral light. 
Among the Hindus it is known as Akasa, which can 
also be translated as aether. Through a knowledge 
of its properties they say that all the wonderful phe- 
nomena of the Oriental Yogis are accomplished. It 
is also claimed that clairvoyance, clairaudience, me- 
diumship, and seership as known to the Western 
world are possible only through its means. It is the 
register of our deeds and thoughts, the great picture 
gallery of the earth, where the seer can always gaze 
upon any event that has ever happened, as well as 
those to come. Swimming in it as in a sea are be- 
ings of various orders and also the astral remains of 
deceased men and women. The Rosicrucians and 
other European mystics called these beings Sylphs, 
Salamanders, Gnomes, Undines, Elementals; the 
Hindu calls them Gandharbhas or celestial musicians, 
Yakshas, Rakshasas and many more. The "spooks" 
of the dead — mistaken by Spiritualists for the indi- 
viduals who are no more — float in this Akasic sub- 
stance, and for centuries have been known to the 
mystical Hindu as Bhuta, another name for devil, or 



60 ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 

Pisacha, a most horrible devil ; neither of them an} 
more than the cast-off soul-body nearest earth, de- 
void of conscience and only powerful for evil. 

But the term "astral light," while not new, is pure- 
ly of Occidental origin. Porphyry spoke of it when 
referring to the celestial or soul-body, which he says 
is immortal, luminous, and "star-like;" Paracelsus 
called it the "sidereal light;" later it grew to be 
known as astral, It was said to be the same as the 
anima mundi or soul of the world. Modern scientific 
investigators approach it when they speak of ' ' lumin- 
iferous ether" and "radiant matter." The great 
astronomer, Camille Flammarion, who was a member 
of the Theosophical Society during his life, speaks of 
the astral light in his novel Uranie and says: "The 
light emanating from all these suns that people im- 
mensity, the light reflected through space by all these 
worlds lighted by these suns, photographs throughout 
the boundless heaven the centuries, the days, the 
moments as they pass. . . . From this it results 
that the histories of all the worlds are travelling 
through space without dispersing altogether, and that 
all the events of the past are present and live ever- 
more in the bosom of the infinite. " 

Like all unfamiliar or occult things the astral light 
is difficult to define, and especially so from the very 
fact that it is called "light." It is not the light as 
we know it, and neither is it darkness. Perhaps it 
was said to be a light because when clairvoyants saw 
by means of it, the distant objects seemed to be il- 
luminated. But as equally well distant sounds can 
be heard in it, heavy bodies levitated by it, odors 
carried thousands of miles through it, thoughts read 
in it, and all the various phenomena by mediums 
brought about under its action, there has been a use 
of the term "light" which while unavoidable is none 
the less erroneous. 

A definition to be accurate must include all the 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



61 



functions and powers of this light, but as those are 
not fully known even to the mystic, and wholly terra 
incognita for the scientist, we must be content with a 
partial analysis. It is a substance easily imagined as 
imponderable ether which, emanating from the stars, 
envelopes the earth and permeates every atom of the 
globe and each molecule upon it. Obeying the laws 
of attraction and repulsion, it vibrates to and fro, 
making itself now positive and now negative. This 
gives it a circular motion which is symbolized by the 
serpent. It is the great final agent, or prime mover, 
cosmically speaking, which not only makes the plant 
grow but also keeps up the diastole and systole of 
the human heart. 

Very like the action of the sensitive photographic 
plate is this light. It takes, as Flammarion says, the 
pictures of every moment and holds them in its grasp. 
For this reason the Egyptians knew it as the Record- 
er; it is the Recording Angel of the Christian, and 
in one aspect it is Yama, the judge of the dead in 
the Hindu pantheon, for it is by the pictures we im- 
press therein that we are judged by Karma. 

As an enormous screen or reflector the astral light 
hangs over the earth and becomes a powerful uni- 
versal hypnotizer of human beings. The pictures of 
all acts good and bad done by our ancestors as by 
ourselves, being ever present to our inner selves, we 
constantly are impressed by them by way of sug- 
gestion and go "then and do likewise. Upon this 
the great French priest-mystic, Eliphas Levi, says: 
"We are often astonished when in society at being- 
assailed by evil thoughts and suggestions that we 
would not have imagined possible, and we are not 
aware that we owe them solely to the presence of 
some morbid neighbor; this fact is of great impor- 
tance, since it relates to the manifestation of con- 
science — one of the most terrible and incontestable 
secrets of the magic art, . . . So diseased souls 



62 ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 

have a bad breath, and vitiate the moral atmosphere ; 
that is to say, they mingle impure reflections with the 
astral light which penetrates them, and thus estab- 
lish deleterious currents. 

There is also a useful function of this light. As 
it preserves the pictures of all past events and 
things, and as there is nothing new under the sun, 
the appliances, the ideas, the philosophy, the arts 
and sciences of long buried civilizations are contin- 
ually being projected in pictures out of the astral 
into the brains of living men. This gives a meaning 
not only to the oft-recurring ''coincidence" of two 
or more inventors or scientists hitting upon the same 
ideas or inventions at about the same time and inde- 
pendently of each other, but also to other events 
and curious happenings. 

Some self-styled scientists have spoken learnedly 
of telepathy, and other phenomena, but give no suf- 
ficient reason in nature for thought-transference or 
apparitions or clairvoyance or the hundred and one 
varieties of occurrences of an occult character no- 
ticed from day to day among all conditions of men. 
It is well to admit that thought may be transferred 
without speech directly from one brain to another, 
but how can the transference be effected without a 
medium?' That medium is the astral light. The 
moment the thought takes shape in the brain it is 
pictured in this light, and from there is taken out 
again by any other brain sensitive enough to receive 
it intact. 

Knowing the strange properties of the astral plane 
and the actual fate of the sheaths of the soul spoken 
of in another article, the Theosophical Adepts of all 
times gave no credit to pretended returning of the 
dead. Eliphas Levi learned this well and said: 
"The astral light combining with ethereal fluids 

* Dogma et Ritual de Haute Magie. 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



65 



forms the astral phantom of which Paracelsus speaks. 
This astral body being freed at death, attracts to 
itself and preserves for a long time, by the sympathy 
of likesness, the reflection of the past life; if a 
powerfully sympathetic will draws it into the proper 
current it manifests itself in the form of an appari- 
tion." But with a sensitive, abnormally constituted 
person present — a medium, in other words, and all of 
that class are nervously unbalanced — the strong will 
is not needed, for the astral light and the living me- 
dium's astral body recall these soulless phantoms, 
and out of the same reservoir take their speech, their 
tones, their idiosyncrasies of character, which the de- 
luded devotees of this debasing practice are cheated 
into imagining as the returned self of dead friend or 
relative. 

Yet all I have referred to here are only instances 
of a few of the various properties of the astral .light. 
vSo far as concerns our world it may be said that as- 
tral light is everywhere, interpenetrating all things; 
to have a photographic power by which it grasps pic- 
tures of thoughts, deeds, events, tones, sounds, col- 
ors, and all things ; reflective in the sense that it re- 
flects itself into the minds of men; repellant from 
its positive side and attractive from the negative ; 
capable of assuming extreme density when drawn in 
around the body by powerful will or by abnorm- 
al bodily states, so that no physical force can pene- 
trate it. This phase of its action explains some facts 
officially recorded during the witchcraft excitement 
in Salem. It was there found that although stones 
and other flying objects came toward the possessed 
one they always fell as it were from the force of 
gravity just at the person s feet. The Hindu. Yogi 
gives evidence of a use of this condensation of the 
astral light when he allows arrows and other pro- 
jectiles to be thrown at him, all of them falling at his 
feet no matter how great their momentum, and the 



64 



ECHOES FROM THE ORIENT. 



records of genuine Spiritualistic phenomena in the 
United States furnish similar experiences. 

The astral light is a powerful factor, unrecognized 
by science, in the phenomenon of hypnotism. Its 
action will explain many of the problems raised by 
Binet, Charcot and others, and especially that class 
in which two or more distinct personalities seem to 
be assumed by the subject, who can remember in 
each only those things and peculiarities of expression 
which belong to that particular stratum of their ex- 
perience. These strange things are due to the cur- 
rents in the astral light. In each current will be 
found a definite series of reflections, and they are 
taken up by the inner man, who reports them through 
speech and action on this plane as if they were his 
own. By the use of these currents too, but uncon- 
sciously, the clairvoyants and clairaudients seem to 
read in the hidden pages of life. 

This light can therefore be impressed with evil or 
good pictures, and these are reflected into the sub- 
conscious mind of every human being. If you fill 
the astral light with bad pictures, just such as the 
present century is adept at creating, it will be our 
devil and destroyer, but if by the example of even 
a few good men and women a new and purer sort of 
events are limned upon this eternal canvas, it will 
become our Divine Uplifter. 



The Theosophical Society : 



HOW TO JOIN IT. 

t^his Society is not a secret or political organization. 

It was founded in New York in 1875. 
Its objects are : 

First. — To form a nucleus of a Universal Broth- 
erhood of Humanity, without distinction of race, 
sex, caste, creed, or color. 

Second. — To promote the study of Aryan and other 
Eastern literatures, religions, and sciences, and dem- 
onstrate the importance of that study. 

Third. — To investigate unexplained laws of nature 
and the psychical powers latent in man. 

The Society appeals for support and encourage- 
ment to all who truly love their fellow-men and de- 
sire the eradication of the evils caused by the barriers 
raised by race, creed, or color, which have so long 
impeded human progress ; to all scholars, to all sin- 
cere lovers of truth, wheresoever it may be found, and 
to all philosophers, alike in the East and in the West ; 
and, lastly, to all who aspire to higher and better 
things than the mere pleasures and interests of a 
worldly life, and are prepared to make the sacrifices 
by which alone a knowledge of them can be attained. 

The Headquarters are at Adyar, a suburb of Mad- 
ras, India, where the Society has a property of 
twenty-seven acres and extensive buildings, includ- 
ing one for the Oriental Library and a spacious hall 
wherein the General Council meets annually in Con- 
vention on the 27th of December. 



THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY : HOW TO JOIN IT. 



The Society is composed of its Branches and mem- 
bers, and is divided into various sections, i.e., India, 
Europe, America, etc. Each Section is autonomous 
and governs the Branches in its jurisdiction without 
interference from Headquarters, provided only that 
the fundamental rules of the Society are not violated. 
All Branches in America and the West Indies are 
under the jurisdiction of the American Section. 

The Indian Section has its office at the Adyar 
Headquarters ; the European at 19 Avenue Road, 
London, N. W., and the American at 144 Madison 
Avenue, New York. 

Throughout the world there are about 250 Branches. 
The American Section includes nearly 80 Branches. 

Members are either Branch members or members- 
at-large, the latter being those who are not in 
Branches. 

The Annual Convention of the American Section 
is held on the fourth Sunday in April, at the place 
determined by the Executive Committee. At each 
Convention an Executive Committee is elected, and 
during the year administers the affairs of the Section 
under the Constitution and Laws passed in Conven- 
tion. All information about the Committee and the 
operations of the Society can be had at Headquarters, 
144 Madison Avenue, New York City. 

On the Pacific Coast there is a Committee for 
Theosophical Work at 1504 Market St., San Francisco; 
and another at Chicago in the Athenaeum Building. 
The Pacific Coast Committee also employs a lecturer. 

HOW TO JOIN. 

Applicants become members by entering a Branch 
or by being admitted as "at-large." In each case an 
application has to be signed, and then endorsed by 
two active members in good standing. Branch Presi- 
dents and the General Secretary have the right to 



THE THE050PHICAL SOCIETY : HOW TO JOIN IT. 



admit members- at-large. Application to enter a 
Branch must be made to the Branch officers. Any 
member- at-large can affiliate with a Branch by which 
he is accepted, and those in Branches may sever that 
connection if they see fit and be demitted as " at- 
large." Entrance fee for members-at-large is $2.00, 
the annual dues $1.00, and the diploma fee 50 cents. 
Branches charge their own dues in addition. 

WHAT MEMBERS RECEIVE. 

All members receive the yearly Report, such docu- 
ments as are from time "to time issued from the 
General Secretary's office, and a copy of The Forum, 
an occasional pamphlet containing questions and an- 
swers upon Theosophical topics, and which it is in- 
tended to issue monthly as near as may be. 

They are also entitled to the use (under the rules) 
of the Circulating Theosophical Library established 
at the Headquarters, No. 144 Madison Ave., New 
York. Additions to this Library are published in 
The Path. 

An Oriental Department has been established in 
the General Secretary's office. It issues free, as often 
as may be, to all members in good standing, a paper 
containing translations of Sanskrit works and also 
articles on Oriental matters. 

The Department of Branch Work also issues monthly 
or oftener to all .Branches a printed paper upon some 
Theosophical subject. 

Inquirers and applicants are requested to address 
the General Secretary at the address given below, 
enclosing a stamp, and will receive from him further 
information or application blanks. 

William Q. Judge, 

Gen. Sec'y American Section, 
144 Madison Ave., 

New York City. 



THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY : HOW TO JOIN IT. 



GENERAL OFFICES AND OFFICERS. 

Pres., Col. H. S. Olcott, Adyar, Madras, India, 

Vice-Pres., William Q. Judge, New York, U. S. A. 

Rec. Sec., S. E. Gopala Charlu, Adyar, Madras. 

Indian Section. — Gen. Sec, Bertram Keightley, 
Adyar, Madras, India. 

American Section. — Gen. Sec, William Q. Judge, 
144 Madison Ave., New York, U. S. A. 

European Section. — Gen. Sec, G. R. S. Mead, 
19 Avenue Road, Regent's Park, London, England. 

PERIODICALS. 

The Theosophist, Adyar, Madras, India, $5.00 per 
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Others also in Asiatic and other languages. 



The P ATH, A MONTHLY MAGAZINE, 

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EDITED BY WILLIAM Q. JUDGE. 

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